Within the new genomes, the team also hunted for genes related to the microbes’ metabolism — what nutrients they consume and what kind of waste they produce. Initially, the team expected that — like other archaea previously found in such environments — these archaea would be methane producers. They do munch on the same materials that methane-producing archaea do: one-carbon compounds like methanol or methylsulfide. “But we couldn’t identify the genes that produce methane,” De Anda says. “They are not present in Brockarchaeota.”
That means that these archaea must have a previously undescribed metabolism, through which they can recycle carbon — for example in sediments on the seafloor — without producing methane. And, given how widespread they are, De Anda says, these organisms could be playing a previously hidden but significant role in Earth’s carbon cycle.
“It’s twofold interesting — it’s a new phylum and a new metabolism,” says Luke McKay, a microbial ecologist of extreme environments at Montana State University in Bozeman. The fact that this entire group could have remained under the radar for so long, he adds, “is an indication of where we are in the state of microbiology.”
But, McKay adds, the discovery is also a testimonial to the power of metagenomics, the technique by which researchers can painstakingly tease apart individual genomes out of a large hodgepodge of microbes in a given sample of water or sediments. Thanks to this technique, researchers are identifying more and more parts of the previously mysterious microbial world.
“There’s so much out there,” De Anda says. And “every time you sequence more DNA, you start to realize that there’s more out there that you weren’t able to see the first time.”
These new fully implantable optogenetic arrays for mice and rats can enable more sophisticated research. Specifically, the researchers can adjust each device’s programming during the course of experiments, “so you can target what an animal does in a much more complex way,” says Genia Kozorovitskiy, a neurobiologist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.
These head-mounted and back-mounted devices are battery-free, wirelessly powered by the same high-frequency radio waves used to remotely control the intensity, duration and timing of the light pulses. The prototypes also allow scientists to simultaneously control four different neural circuits in an animal, thanks to LEDs that emit four hues — blue, green, yellow and red — instead of just one.
In experiments with mice, Kozorovitskiy and colleagues used the devices to target the prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain linked with decision making and other complex behaviors. When the team delivered similar patterns of neural stimulation in this area to pairs or trios of mice, the rodents groomed and sniffed companions with whom their neurons were in sync more often than ones with whom they were out of sync. The findings support previous research suggesting this kind of synchrony between minds can boost social behavior, “particularly cooperative interactions,” Kozorovitskiy says.
The widely available wireless technology used in this work, the same now used in contactless payment with credit cards, could allow broad adoption across the neuroscience community “without extensive specialized hardware,” says neurotechnologist Philipp Gutruf at the University of Arizona at Tucson, who did not take part in this research. That “means that we might see these devices in many labs in the near future, enabling new discoveries.” The insights gained on the nervous system from such research, he says, may in turn “inform better diagnostics and therapeutics in humans.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by TTE staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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