Category: 7. Science

In 2014, a team from the US used 2,000 seismometers to study seismic waves from over 500 earthquakes. By examining the speed of the waves at different depths, the team was able to determine what kind of rocks the waves traveled through before reaching the sensors. They found that some 700 kilometers (400 miles) below our feet in the “transition zone” between the lower mantle and the upper mantle was a rock called ringwoodite. 

Ringwoodite only forms under the intense pressure found towards the center of our planet. Only one sample from within the Earth – it has also been found in meteorites – has been discovered, trapped inside a tiny diamond. Ringwoodite contains water, not as liquid but trapped inside the molecular structure of the minerals.

“The ringwoodite is like a sponge, soaking up water. There is something very special about the crystal structure of ringwoodite that allows it to attract hydrogen and trap water,” geophysicist Steve Jacobsen explained in a statement at the time.  “This mineral can contain a lot of water under conditions of the deep mantle.” 

Previous experiments suggested that ringwoodite can contain up to 1.5 percent water, and the seismic waves detected were consistent with the rock below our feet containing water. The team estimated that if just 1 percent of the rock in the transition zone is water, that would mean it contains three times more water than all the oceans on Earth’s surface. This fit with their results. 

“If there is a substantial amount of H₂O in the transition zone, then some melting should take place in areas where there is flow into the lower mantle,” seismologist Brandon Schmandt said, “and that is consistent with what we found.” 

Jacobsen believes that the study contributes to evidence that Earth’s water “came from within,” he told New Scientist. “I think we are finally seeing evidence for a whole-Earth water cycle, which may help explain the vast amount of liquid water on the surface of our habitable planet,” Jacobsen added in the statement. “Scientists have been looking for this missing deep water for decades.”

While the evidence appears to show that there is a lot of water stored in the mantle transition zone (MTZ), there is still debate about how it got there, either being a primordial source within the Earth, or making its way down into the Earth from the surface. 

In the new study, researchers looked at samples taken from the Emeishan Large Igneous Province in southern China, which has been linked to mantle plume activity. The team looked at heavy boron isotopes within the rock, finding that the levels were outside those in known mantle compositions, and more similar to those found in slab serpentinites – metamorphosed rocks that are part of a subducting tectonic plate.

“Our results suggest that subduction of serpentinized oceanic lithospheric mantle can transport considerable amounts of water into the Earth’s interior, leading to localized hydration of the deep mantle, probably at the mantle transition zone,” the team explains in their paper. “This water is then captured by the upwelling of deeply rooted plume material and recycled back to the Earth’s surface.”

While it is too far to suggest that this is where all of the Earth’s inner water came from, it does provide evidence that it can be subducted into the Earth as the crust is subducted into the Earth, only to be recycled again on geological timescales. More data, perhaps from elsewhere around the world, is needed to delve further into the mystery.

“Identifying modern analogues is challenging, because they must satisfy two critical criteria: a prolonged cold slab subduction in the region and subsequent ascent of a mantle plume behind the trench,” the team explains. 

“One potential modern analogue may be the Columbia River LIP [large igneous province], where the Miocene CFBs [continental flood basalts] are thought to be intimately linked to the Yellowstone mantle plume. Prior to the Columbia River LIP eruption, the Farallon oceanic slab underwent prolonged subduction beneath the North American plate, possibly extending into the mantle transition zone. Therefore, similar heavy boron isotope signatures may be expected to occur in the Columbia River CFBs.”

The study is published in Communications Earth & Environment.

In South American rainforests, giant anteaters dig into termite mounds with their long, sticky tongues. In Africa and Asia, pangolins and aardvarks use strong claws to break into ant nests. These animals aren’t closely related, but they’ve all evolved to hunt the same thing—ants and termites.

A sweeping new study published this month in the journal Evolution has revealed just how frequently—and oddly predictably—mammals have evolved to dine exclusively on social insects. According to the research, this specialized ant-and-termite diet, known as myrmecophagy, has independently evolved at least 12 times in mammals over the past 66 million years.

“Things keep evolving into anteaters, somehow,” Thomas Vida, the study’s lead author and a paleontologist formerly at the University of Bonn, told Science.

The Anteater Blueprint

To unravel why this evolutionary path is so common, Vida and his colleagues, Phillip Barden of the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Zachary Calamari of the City University of New York, combed through more than 600 scientific sources, compiling dietary data for 4,099 mammal species. They then mapped this information onto the mammalian family tree, tracing the evolutionary paths of species across millions of years.

The results were striking. From marsupials like the Australian numbat to egg-laying echidnas and placental mammals like the pangolin, ant-eating had evolved repeatedly—and independently.

“There are twice as many origins of ant- and termite-eating in mammals as there are origins of crab body plans,” Barden told ScienceAlert. “And that’s not even counting the over 10,000 species of arthropods that mimic ant and termite morphology, behavior, or chemical signaling to evade predation or get access to social insect resources.”

Long, narrow skulls, sticky, extendable tongues, powerful forelimbs with claws made for ripping into hardened mounds, little to no teeth, and even sluggish metabolisms. These mammals are obligate specialists, laser-focused on insect diets. Their entire anatomy is shaped by the demands of a single food source.

“There are a few obvious things: their skulls and tongues tend to elongate, their teeth often get reduced, and they usually have strong claws/forelimbs for tearing into insect nests,” Vida told ScienceAlert. “There are also some less obvious things, like their low body temperatures/slow metabolisms and their enzymatic adaptations towards digesting chitin.”

These traits appear across mammal species that otherwise have little in common. In other words, this is a prime example of convergent evolution, where unrelated species independently evolve similar traits to solve similar problems.

The Rise of the Planet of the Ants

What drove mammals to become anteaters, again and again?

The answer lies in the ants and termites themselves. Ants are ubiquitous today, with one study estimating there are 20 quadrillion of them on Earth, outweighing all wild birds and mammals combined. But they weren’t always this dominant. Just after the dinosaurs disappeared, ants made up less than 1% of the insect population.

But as flowering plants spread and ecosystems rebounded, ants and termites began to thrive. By the Miocene, around 23 million years ago, they had become ecosystem engineers, shaping everything from plant pollination to nutrient cycling. In tropical forests today, ants and termites outweigh all other insects and vertebrates combined.

“Social insects just have this way of causing co-evolution around them,” Vida said.

As these insect societies expanded into vast, protein-rich buffets, mammals evolved to exploit them. The study’s analysis of 158 social insect species confirmed that large colony sizes emerged mostly in the Cenozoic Era, creating stable, energy-dense food sources that made specialized foraging worthwhile.

It’s a high-risk, high-reward strategy. Ants and termites are rich in nutrients but low in calories. Only a narrow suite of adaptations makes the diet feasible. Yet once mammals adapt, they tend to stick with it. Across the 12 evolutionary branches leading to myrmecophagy, the researchers found only one example of reversal: the short-eared elephant shrew. This species transitioned back to a generalist diet roughly 13 million years ago.

“In some ways, specializing on ants and termites paints a species into a corner,” Barden told Nautilus. “But as long as social insects dominate the world’s biomass, these mammals may have an edge—especially as climate change seems to favor species with massive colonies, like fire ants and other invasive social insects.”

The Evolutionary Power of Ants

The findings deepen our understanding of how key species, like ants and termites, can ripple across the tree of life. The team’s database, one of the largest dietary datasets ever assembled for mammals, offers fertile ground for future studies. It could help scientists examine dietary specialization in other vertebrates—or even track how climate affects their feeding strategies.

“The history of life is full of crossovers,” Barden reflected. “Even very distantly related lineages—social insects and mammals last shared a common ancestor more than 500 million years ago—interact in ways that can kick off striking specializations over tens of millions of years.”

Laura Wilson, an evolutionary biologist at the Australian National University who was not involved in the study, told Science the findings are “bizarre and fascinating,” highlighting how little we still know about the evolutionary conditions that led mammals to become ant specialists.

Before mammals entered the picture, social insects were mainly targeted by other insects. The arrival of clawed, warm-blooded predators might have spurred them to evolve larger colonies or different defensive venoms—something future researchers may probe.

“It’s important to remember that the loss of any one species may have lots of unexpected consequences,” Barden said.

Physicists have caught neutrinos from a nuclear reactor using a device weighing just a few kilograms, orders of magnitude less massive than standard neutrino detectors. The technique opens new ways to stress-test the known laws of physics and to detect the copious neutrinos produced in the hearts of collapsing stars.

“They finally did it,” says Kate Scholberg, a physicist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. “And they have very beautiful result.” The experiment, called CONUS+, is described on 30 July in Nature.

Challenging quarry

Neutrinos are elementary particles that have no electrical charge and generally don’t interact with other matter, making them extraordinarily difficult to detect. Most neutrino experiments catch these elusive particles by observing flashes of light that are generated when a neutrino collides with an electron, proton or neutron. These collisions occur extremely infrequently, so such detectors typically have masses of tonnes or thousands of tonnes to provide enough target material to gather neutrinos in relevant numbers.

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Scholberg and her collaborators first demonstrated the mini-detector technique in 2017, using it to catch neutrinos produced by an accelerator at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. The Oak Ridge particles have slightly higher energies than those made in reactors. As a result, detecting reactor neutrinos was even more challenging, she says. But lower-energy neutrinos also allow for a more precise test of the standard model of physics.

Scholberg’s COHERENT detector was the first to exploit a phenomenon called coherent scattering, in which a neutrino ‘scatters’ off an entire atomic nucleus rather than the atom’s constituent particles.

Coherent scattering uses the fact that particles of matter can act as waves — and the lower the particles’ energy, the longer their wavelength, says Christian Buck, a leader of the CONUS collaboration. If the wavelength of a neutrino is similar to the nucleus’s diameter, “then the neutrino sees the nucleus as one thing. It doesn’t see the internal structure”, says Buck, who is a physicist at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, Germany. The neutrino doesn’t interact with any subatomic particles, but does cause the nucleus to recoil — depositing a tiny amount of energy into the detector.

Catching sight of a nucleus

Coherent scattering occurs more than 100 times as frequently as the interactions used in other detectors, where the neutrino ‘sees’ a nucleus as a collection of smaller particles with empty space in between. This higher efficiency means that detectors can be smaller and still spot a similar number of particles in the same time frame. “Now you can afford to build detectors on the kilogram scale,” Buck says.

The downside is that the neutrinos deposit much less energy at the nucleus. The recoil induced on a nucleus by a neutrino is comparable to that produced on a ship by a ping-pong ball, Buck says — and has until recent years has been extremely challenging to measure.

The CONUS detector is made of four modules of pure germanium, each weighing 1 kilogram. It operated at a nuclear reactor in Germany from 2018 until that reactor was shut down in 2022. The team then moved the detector, upgraded to CONUS+, to the Leibstadt nuclear power plant in Switzerland. From the new location, the team now reports having seen around 395 collision events in 119 days of operation — consistent with the predictions of the standard model of particle physics.

After COHERENT’s landmark 2017 result, which was obtained with detectors made of caesium iodide, Scholberg’s team repeated the feat with detectors made of argon and of germanium. Separately, last year, two experiments originally designed to hunt for dark matter reported seeing hints of low-energy coherent scattering of neutrinos produced by the Sun. Scholberg says that the standard model makes very clean predictions of the rate of coherent scattering and how it changes with different types of atomic nucleus, making it crucial to compare results from as many detecting materials as possible. And if the technique’s sensitivity improves further, coherent scattering could help to push forward the state of the art of solar science.

Researchers say that coherent scattering will probably not completely replace any existing technologies for detecting neutrinos. But it can spot all three known types of neutrino (and their corresponding antiparticles) down to low energies, whereas some other techniques can capture only one type. This ability means it could complement massive detectors that aim to pick up neutrinos at higher energies, such as the Hyper-Kamiokande observatory now under construction in Japan.

This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on July 30 2025.

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Evolutionary plant biologists at the University of Toronto have identified a protein that evolved approximately 500 million years ago, enabling plants to convert light into energy through photosynthesis as they moved from aquatic environments to land.

The discovery provides a target for sustainable herbicides against parasitic plants and other weeds and may help boost food security by increasing the efficiency of photosynthesis in crops.

Using genome analysis and CRISPR gene editing, the researchers pinpointed Shikimate kinase-like 1 (SKL1) as a protein present in all land plants — but no other organisms — and showed the protein evolved from the Shikimate kinase (SK) enzyme to play an essential role in forming the chloroplasts needed for photosynthesis.

“One of the fundamental questions we investigate in this study is: what were the initial events that contributed to simple aquatic organisms moving onto land” says Michael Kanaris, lead author of the paper published recently in Molecular Biology and Evolution.

“A role for SKL1 in chloroplast biogenesis has previously been determined in Arabidopsis, a flowering plant studied extensively in modern laboratories. However, the biological function for SKL1 has not been established in early land plants.”

Kanaris conducted the research with Professor Dinesh Christendat in the Department of Cell & Systems Biology in the Faculty of Arts & Science whose work focuses on the evolution of new protein functions. When DNA replication errors result in two identical copies of a protein, one copy may take on new functions as organisms adapt to changing environments over millions of years of evolution.

One example is the SKL1 protein in flowering plants, which originated as a copy of the SK protein, but gained a new function. Christendat’s prior research determined that flowering plants — evolving approximately 130 million years ago — became stunted and albino without SKL1 due to defective chloroplast development that impairs photosynthesis.

To look even further back into the evolution of land plants, the researchers used CRISPR genome editing to disrupt SKL1 function in common liverworts, which were among the first plants to colonize land about 500 million years ago. The team then put liverwort SKL1 into an albino flowering plant lacking SKL1, which resulted in seedlings that grew a green set of leaves with rescued chloroplasts.

The result was so unexpected that the researchers repeated the experiment several times.

They confirmed that liverworts with disrupted SKL1 are pale and have stunted growth, just like flowering plants lacking SKL1, suggesting SKL1 might have the same function in chloroplast development in a plant significantly older than more modern flowers.

“My colleagues and I were astonished because liverworts are a very ancient plant species,” says Christendat. “We assumed that the way SKL1 functions in liverwort would be very different to a more recently evolved plant. Not only is SKL1 function conserved over 500 million years of plant evolution, it is also essential for their existence on land.”

The researchers note that while all land plants have SKL1 — as revealed by an analysis of gene sequences from diverse liverworts, ferns, mosses and flowering plants — ancestors to modern-day plants including water-living algae have only the original SK protein.

“The inability to identify SKL1 in organisms predating land plants suggests an important role for this gene coinciding with the emergence of terrestrial plants,” says Kanaris.

Christendat says knowing the role SKL1 plays in photosynthesis could both improve the ability to grow crops and make it a more effective target for new generations of herbicides, as the metabolic pathway that involves the SK protein is the current target of most herbicides. “Certain domains of the SKL1 protein vary across plants, so it may be possible to target SKL1 from specific plants to ensure safety and agricultural sustainability.”

Reference: Kanaris M, Lee J, Chang B, Christendat D. Shikimate kinase-like 1 participates in an ancient and conserved role contributing to chloroplast biogenesis in land plants. Mol Biol Evol. 2025;42(6):msaf129. doi: 10.1093/molbev/msaf129

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Mars has long fascinated scientists and space explorers, especially when it comes to the presence of water. Now, new research offers a clearer picture of the glaciers scattered across the Red Planet and it’s exciting news for future human missions. It turns out these glaciers may be made up of more than 80 percent pure water ice, and in some cases, almost entirely of ice.

How do glaciers on Mars look?

On Mars, many of the glaciers lie on mountain slopes and are covered with dust and rocks. For years, scientists believed these formations were mostly rocky with some ice, about 30 percent, or, at best, heavily debris-covered glaciers with more than 80 percent ice. But this new study challenges those earlier views.

What’s new about this study?

Published recently in Science Direct, the research shows a surprising uniformity in the glaciers’ composition. Unlike earlier studies that used different methods on different sites, making it hard to compare results, this one applied a single technique across multiple locations. It found that glaciers in both hemispheres of Mars are made up of a high percentage of clean ice.

One of the researchers, Isaac Smith, explained that earlier research used different tools and focused on different parts of Mars, making comparisons tricky. He is a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute and an associate professor at York University in Canada.

What tools did they use?

The team used SHARAD (SHAllow RADar), a radar instrument on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. By measuring how radar waves travel through the surface and how much of the signal is lost, they were able to estimate the ratio of ice to rock inside the glaciers. Their findings suggest the glaciers have a surprisingly high level of ice purity.

Why is this important?

High-purity glaciers could be a game-changer for human missions to Mars. Water is essential, not just for drinking, but also for making oxygen and rocket fuel. If astronauts can find ice that’s already clean, it will take much less energy to extract and use it, compared to ice that’s mixed with lots of rock and dirt.

According to the study, the clean ice is protected by a thin layer of rock or dust. This layer acts as insulation, keeping the ice safe from Mars’ extreme cold and dry conditions.

How did the ice form?

The researchers suggest a few possible ways the ice might have formed. It could have fallen as snow and collected into glaciers, or it may have formed directly on the ground through condensation. Both processes would lead to fairly clean ice.

What seems unlikely is that the ice formed through what’s called “pore ice”, where water vapour from the atmosphere moves underground and freezes. That process usually leads to more impurities, which weren’t found in these glaciers.

A window into Mars’ past

The consistency of the ice across different glaciers hints that Mars may have gone through a single massive glaciation event, or several smaller ones that had similar conditions.

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Astronomers think they have detected an extremely rare type of “missing link” black hole chowing down on a helpless star at the edge of a distant galaxy — and they’ve shared a stunning animation showing what this superbright stellar massacre may have looked like.

Black holes come in a range of sizes, from primordial singularities smaller than the sun to supermassive black holes that are up to 40 billion times more massive than our home star and hold together galaxies such as the Milky Way. There are also medium-size versions, known as intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs), which range from 100 to 100,000 solar masses. We know little about these medium-size objects, however, as they are incredibly hard to find.

The humble modern-day potato, first domesticated about 10,000 years ago, got its start in the Andes mountains before becoming a key crop the world depends on. But because plants don’t preserve well in the fossil record, its lineage has remained largely a mystery.

Now, a team of evolutionary biologists and genomic scientists has traced the origins of this starchy staple to a chance encounter millions of years ago involving an unlikely plant relative: the tomato.

The researchers analyzed 450 genomes from cultivated and wild potato species, and the genes revealed that an ancient wild tomato plant ancestor naturally bred with a potato-like plant called Etuberosum 9 million years ago — or interbred, as both plants had originally split off from a common ancestor plant about 14 million years ago, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Cell.

While neither tomatoes or Etuberosums had the ability to grow tubers — the enlarged, edible part of domesticated plants such as potatoes, yams and taros that grow underground — the resulting hybrid plant did. Tubers evolved as an innovative way for the potato plant to store nutrients underground as the climate and environment in the Andes became colder — and once cultivated, resulted in a dietary mainstay for humans. There are now more than 100 wild potato species that also grow tubers, although not all are edible because some contain toxins.

“Evolving a tuber gave potatoes a huge advantage in harsh environments, fueling an explosion of new species and contributing to the rich diversity of potatoes we see and rely on today,” study coauthor Sanwen Huang, president of the Chinese Academy of Tropical Agricultural Sciences and a professor at the Agricultural Genomics Institute at Shenzhen, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, said in a statement. “We’ve finally solved the mystery of where potatoes came from.”

The scientists have also decoded which genes were supplied by each plant to create tubers in the first place. Understanding how potatoes originated and evolved could ultimately help scientists breed more resilient potatoes that are resistant to disease and shifting climate conditions.

Potatoes, tomatoes and Etuberosums all belong to the genus Solanum, which includes about 1,500 species and is the largest genus in the nightshade family of flowering plants. At first glance, potato plants look nearly identical to Etuberosum, which initially led scientists to think that the two were sisters that came from a common ancestor, said study coauthor JianQuan Liu, a professor in the college of ecology at Lanzhou University in Gansu, China.

Etuberosums include just three species, and while the plants have flowers and leaves similar to those of potato plants, they don’t produce tubers.

“Etuberosums are a special thing,” Dr. Sandy Knapp, study coauthor and research botanist at the Natural History Museum in London, told CNN. “They’re things that you probably would never see unless you went to the Juan Fernandes islands, the Robinson Crusoe islands in the middle of the Pacific, or if you were in the temple rainforest of Chile.”

But charting out the lineage of potatoes, tomatoes and Etuberosums revealed an unexpected wrinkle that seemed to indicate that potatoes were more closely related to tomatoes on a genetic level, Knapp said.

The team used phylogenetic analyses —a process similar to determining in humans a parent-daughter or sister-sister relationship on a genetic level — to determine the relationships among the different plants, Liu said.

The analysis showed a contradiction: Potatoes could be a sister to Etuberosums or tomatoes, depending on different genetic markers, Liu said.

The 14 million-year-old common ancestor of tomatoes and Etuberosums, and the plants that diverged from it, don’t exist anymore and “are lost in the mists of geological time,” Knapp said. Instead, the researchers looked for genetic markers within the plants to determine their origins.

“What we use is a signal that’s come through from the past, which is still there in the plants that we have today, to try to reconstruct the past,” Knapp said.

To track that signal through time, the researchers compiled a genetic database for potatoes, including looking at museum specimens and even retrieving data from rare wild potatoes that are hard to find, some of them occurring in just a single valley in the Andes, Knapp said.

“Wild potatoes are very difficult to sample, so this dataset represents the most comprehensive collection of wild potato genomic data ever analyzed,” study coauthor Zhiyang Zhang, a researcher for the Agricultural Genomics Institute at Shenzhen at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, said in a statement.

The research revealed that the first potato, and every subsequent potato species, included a combination of genetic material that derived from Etuberosums and tomatoes.

Climatic or geological changes likely caused an ancient Etuberosum and a tomato ancestor to coexist in the same place, Liu said.

Given that both species are bee-pollinated, the likely scenario is that a bee moved pollen between the two plants and led to the creation of the potato, said Amy Charkowski, research associate dean of Colorado State University’s College of Agricultural Sciences. Charkowski was not involved in the new research.

The tomato side supplied a “master switch” SP6A gene, which told the potato plant to start making tubers, while a IT1 gene from the Etuberosum side controlled the growth of the underground stems that formed the starchy tubers, Liu said. If either gene were missing or didn’t work in concert, potatoes never would have formed tubers, according to the researchers.

“One of the things that happens in hybridization is that genes get mixed up,” Knapp said. “It’s like shuffling a deck of cards again, and different cards come up in different combinations. And fortunately for this particular hybridization event, two sorts of genes came together, which created the ability to tuberize, and that’s a chance event.”

The evolution of tuberous potatoes coincided with a time when the Andes mountains were rapidly rising due to interactions among tectonic plates, which created a huge spine down the western side of South America, Knapp said. The Andes are a complex mountain range with numerous valleys and a range of ecosystems.

Modern tomatoes like dry, hot environments, while Etuberosums prefer a temperate space. But the ancestor of the potato plant evolved to thrive in the dry, cold, high-altitude habitats that sprang up across the Andes, with the tuber enabling its ultimate survival, Knapp said. Potatoes could reproduce without the need for seeds or pollination. The growth of new tubers led to new plants, and they could flourish across diverse environments.

The cultivated potato we consume today is currently the world’s third most important staple crop, and with wheat, rice and maize, is responsible for 80% of human caloric intake, according to the study.

Understanding the potato’s origin story could be the key to breeding more innovation into future potatoes; reintroducing key tomato genes could lead to fast-breeding potatoes reproduced by seeds, something with which Huang and his team at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences are experimenting.

Modern crops face pressures from environmental change, the climate crisis and new pests and diseases, Knapp said.

Seed potatoes are of interest because they may be more genetically diverse and resistant to disease and other agricultural risks, Knapp said. Vegetatively reproducing potatoes — cutting a potato into pieces and planting them to create a crop — results in genetically identical potatoes that can be wiped out if a new disease comes along.

Studying wild species that have come up against and evolved in response to such challenges could also be crucial, she added.

Charkowski’s lab is interested in how wild potatoes resist disease, and why some plant pests and diseases only affect potatoes or tomatoes.

“In addition to helping us understand potato evolution and potato tuber development, the methods used (in this study) can also help researchers learn about other traits, such as disease and insect resistance, nutrition, drought tolerance, and many other important plant traits in potato and tomato,” Charkowski said.

Potatoes remain an important crop in arid regions or areas with short summers and high altitudes — places where other major crops don’t grow, she said.

The findings also show potatoes in a different light: the result of a chance encounter of two very different individuals, said study coauthor Dr. Tiina Särkinen, a nightshade expert at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.

“That’s actually quite romantic,” she said. “The origin of many of our species isn’t a simple story, and it’s very exciting that we can now discover these tangled, complex origins thanks to the wealth of genomic data.”

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A draft genome sequence was assembled and annotated for an uncultured archaeon reconstructed from shotgun metagenomes obtained from Antarctic endoliths.

The assembled genome is 1.99 megabases and encodes 2,405 predicted protein-coding genes. This genome sequence provides insights into the microbial diversity and functional potential of extremophiles inhabiting Antarctic rock environments.

Endolithic microbial communities in Antarctica thrive in one of the most extreme environments on Earth.

These communities inhabit rock airspaces, exploiting microenvironments that allow them to survive at the limits of habitability. They host highly adapted microbes that sustain metabolism through trace gas oxidation and atmospheric chemosynthesis under extreme oligotrophic conditions.

Here, we report the draft genome sequence of an uncultured Nitrosocosmicus archaeon reconstructed from shotgun metagenomes from Antarctic endolithic communities.

Draft Genome Sequence Of An Uncultured Archaeon From Antarctic Endolithic Communities, Ecology,

Astrobiology,