Researchers revive bacteria from the era of the dinosaurs

FAR FROM the life-sustaining light of the sun, the deep sea floor appears barren and desolate. Its appearance, however, belies a thriving bacterial ecosystem that may contain as much as 45% of the world’s biomass of microbes. This ecosystem is fuelled by what is known as marine snow—a steady shower of small, nutrient-rich particles that fall like manna from the ocean layers near the surface, where photosynthesis takes place.

Not all of the snow is digestible, though. And the indigestible parts build up, layer upon layer, burying as they do so the bugs in the layer below. To look at how well these bacteria survive entombment a group of researchers led by Morono Yuki of the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology and Steven D’Hondt of the University of Rhode Island studied samples collected in 2010 by the Integrated Ocean Drilling Programme, a decade-long international expedition of which they were part. Their results, just published in Nature Communications, are extraordinary. They seem to have brought back to life bacteria that have been dormant for over 100m years.