As many of you know, I generally avoid writing about non open access publications here. But occasionally I make exceptions. And I am making one today. There is a wicked cool paper out in Nature today. Entitled "Hydrogen is an energy source for hydrothermal vent symbioses" comes from Nicole Dubilier, Jillian Petersen and others. It is about my favorite ecosystem(s) on the planet - hydrothermal vents. I became interested in these vents in 1989 when I met Colleen Cavanaugh who at the time was a Junior Fellow at Harvard. She told me about her work on bacteria that live inside tubeworms, clams and other creatures in the deep sea that are key to the lives of these animals. The bacteria are chemosynthetic (i.e., they use the energy of chemicals to drive carbon fixation). The animals have either no digestive systems or very degenerate ones and the bacteria function much like chloroplasts do for plants. The bacteria basically make everything for their hosts while the hosts collect energy (chemicals in this case) and oxygen and CO2 for the microbes.After hearing Colleen tell me about her work on these symbioses and how at the time nobody knew much about the symbionts, I joined her new lab at Harvard (she was just appointed as a junior professor) and worked in her lab in my Senior year and after graduating (and ended up publishing my first paper on symbionts of a clam Solemya velum). I have been captivated by symbioses ever since. So much so that many years later I worked with Colleen, Irene Netwon, Tanya Woyke, Dongying Wu and others to sequence and analyze the first genome of any of the chemosynthetic symbiotic bacteria.
