Bizarre Form of Life Found in Arctic Ocean!

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Bizarre Form of Life Found in Arctic Ocean!

A team of European researchers had found new organisms when they analyzed the DNA sequences that were present in samples of sea water.The Genetic evidence is suggesting the presence of an unknown kind of microalgae, which the researchers called as picobiliphytes ("pico" means "a trillionth of a part of") because of their very minute size.

"These organisms represent a new evolutionary lineage," said team member Fabrice Not. Not is a marine biologist at the Institut de Ciències del Mar, a part of Spain's National Research Council.
"The discovery didn't provide any sister relationship to any other groups of organisms known to date. It means that this new group is probably a high-rank taxon [group] in terms of classification,". "In fact, the divergence of this group from known organisms is as great as the difference between land plants and animals," Connie Lovejoy, a biologist at Universit Laval in Canada and another member of the research team, said in a statement.

The Story Beyond

Over an year the research team had tried techniques to see and count the tiny picobiliphytes, the scientists have not been able to grow microalgae in the lab. The scientists confirmed that picobiliphytes contain pigments called phycobilins that give out an orange fluorescent radiance when placed under blue light.

Another organism must have lived inside the picobiliphytes and provided them with an energy supply in the form of the light-absorbing pigments, that are not mentioned.In this case, judging from the type of pigments involved, the picobiliphytes probably got their pigments from a reddish microalgae, he added.

Biodiversity

Actually this discovery is a great boom for biodiversity. This is primarily pure fundamental research with no commercial application. The main fields this research impacts is the discovery of the microbial ecology and the evolution of eukaryotes' that contain the cells that also have a nucleus.

Robert Andersen, director of the Provasoli-Guillard National Center for Culture of Marine Phytoplankton in Maine, says the discovery is "terrific" and could have "considerable value" commercially. Andersen said other phycobilin-producing algae are commercially grown for their pigments, which are used in products such as cosmetics.

"Phycobilipigments are also rich sources of protein, and they are used as a food source in aquaculture hatcheries," he said. If the new picobiliphytes can be grown in sufficient quantities to provide such a nutrient source, he added, "they will really be valuable."