Researching uses of extremophiles
Dr Adele Williamson from The University of Waikato is researching extremophiles. She wants to understand what mechanisms these bacteria have evolved that allow them to preserve their genetic material in these extreme environments and if that could lead to new and exciting advancements in diagnostic tools in hospitals or in the field.
Point of interest:
At 1 minute 40 seconds into this video, you’ll see Adele talking with Professor Craig Cary. Craig oversaw the team that collected soil samples from the Dry Valleys in Antarctica. It is these samples that Adele has extracted microorganisms from for her research.
Find out more about Dr Adele Williamson’s research and the scientific concepts that underpin this work:
Transcript
Dr Adele Williamson
My current research is looking at how bacteria replicate, diversify and repair their genetic material in extreme environments under challenging circumstances that we humans would struggle to survive in. So I’m looking at some of our classic extreme environments – for example, the geothermal features in Aotearoa New Zealand, the Dry Valleys of Antarctica and some environments that maybe don’t quite as easily come to mind as being extreme, so for example, the cyanobacteria living in the upper levels of the open ocean and some human pathogens as well.
I’m trying to understand what mechanisms these bacteria have evolved that actually allow them to preserve their genetic material in these extreme environments and are these mechanisms different from what we would call mesophilic bacteria, which are our model bacteria that we already know quite a lot about.
There’s a couple of reasons that we would really like to understand how extremophiles repair their DNA. One of these reasons is that a lot of the molecular biology enzymes that scientists buy in a little tube and use in the lab to do cool things to DNA such as cut it up, rejoin it, change it actually come from DNA repair and replication. And so one of my ideas is that, if we can find new enzymes that can do cool things to DNA from some of these extremophiles, we might be able to develop new diagnostic and molecular biological techniques. Extremophiles are a really good place to look for these kinds of enzymes because they function outside of the parameters that we would typically have at room temperature.
I’m really interested finding molecular biology tools that you don’t need to be working in a lab to use. Being able to use simple things like temperature switching means that maybe you can take your molecular biology away from a complex lab environment and to be able to actually use some of these enzymes say in a hospital setting, in the field or something like this where you can, simply by boiling a tube or cooling it down, be able to actually modulate the activity of those enzymes and get them to do what you want them to do.
Another thing that I’m really interested in is being able to find DNA replication and repair enzymes that could work with non-natural nucleic acid substrates. And this would be really cool because this could actually allow us to insert different nucleotides into artificial DNA, which could then either be used to mark that DNA as being non-natural or allow us to produce proteins that have new amino acids that don’t exist at the moment – so to do synthetic biology, which then we could use further to make even more advanced enzymes or enzymes with different functionalities or allow us to study those enzymes differently in the lab.
Acknowledgements
Dr Adele Williamson, The University of Waikato Professor Craig Cary, The University of Waikato White Island volcanic activity, filmed by Bradley Scott. GNS Science Time-lapses from the McMurdo Dry Valleys in Antarctica, Keith Heyward and Jennifer Berglund, Prehensile Productions Underwater view of sun penetrating top layer of ocean, Samuel Nowack. CC BY 3.0 Marion Woodcock Epi being taken from a heat bath and put on ice, from Gene Cloning. NextBIO
