{"id":40,"date":"2018-02-06T13:55:29","date_gmt":"2018-02-06T13:55:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.colby.edu\/peck-laboratory\/?page_id=40"},"modified":"2019-06-11T01:57:41","modified_gmt":"2019-06-11T01:57:41","slug":"halophiles","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/peck-laboratory\/halophiles\/","title":{"rendered":"Cool stuff about halophiles!"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The Spiral Jetty<\/b><\/b><\/i><\/a> was constructed by artist Robert Smithson on the northeastern shore of the Great Salt Lake near Rozel Point in Utah. It is made of mud, salt, and basalt rocks.\u00a0\u00a0 The coil is 1,500-foot-long (460\u00a0m), 15-foot-wide (4.6\u00a0m) and surrounded by extremely salty water: 27% salinity, perfect for halophilic Archaea, whose characteristic color makes the art installation pop with pink.<\/p>\n

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Bacteriorhodopsin<\/a><\/strong> is a trans-membrane protein, seen here with its cofactor, retinal (in purple), bound within the seven helices. It is a proton pump- the retinal is excited by a photon of light, which changes the conformation of the seven protein helices and provides the pumping action.\u00a0 This sets up a proton gradient which is then converted into chemical energy.<\/p>\n

Chlorophyll, what we usually associate with harnessing the sun’s energy, acts very differently because it requires many more associated proteins in the electron transport chain and utilizes multiple pigments for the initial photon excitation.<\/p>\n

Above two images free from copyright and acquired from Wikipedia.<\/p>\n

\"\"The San Francisco Bay hosts the Leslie Salt Company.\u00a0 Shallow areas separated by levees are filled with sea water and allowed to evaporate.\u00a0 This creates increasingly hypersaline environments that only specific species can inhabit.\u00a0 This photo from gagdaily.com<\/a> shows the biological transition from algae and bacteria to Archaea.\u00a0 The pink pans contain Archaea producing carotenoid pigments including bacteriorhodopsin. Click the link to see more astounding photos of these man-made hypersaline habitats.<\/p>\n

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Read about\u00a0Halobacterium salinarum<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Read about bacteriorhodopsin<\/a>\u00a0structure and production.<\/p>\n

Okay, so\u00a0what exactly is a carotenoid<\/a>?<\/p>\n

Much of our inquiry relies on\u00a0synthetic biology<\/a>\u2014 find out about this field.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Spiral Jetty was constructed by artist Robert Smithson on the northeastern shore of the Great Salt Lake near Rozel Point in Utah. It is made of mud, salt, and basalt rocks.\u00a0\u00a0 The coil is 1,500-foot-long (460\u00a0m), 15-foot-wide (4.6\u00a0m) and surrounded by extremely salty water: 27% salinity, perfect for halophilic Archaea, whose characteristic color makes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7806,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/peck-laboratory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/40"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/peck-laboratory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/peck-laboratory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/peck-laboratory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7806"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/peck-laboratory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/peck-laboratory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/40\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":241,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/peck-laboratory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/40\/revisions\/241"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/peck-laboratory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}