Antarctic bacteria share ‘life-support’ genes to survive extreme conditions

Ry Holland, CC BY Antarctica is one of the driest, coldest places on Earth. Very little life survives its extremes. In the soils dotted around the frozen ice sheets, however, communities of microbes do survive. And one of the keys to their success is a surprisingly communal strategy. Unrelated organisms share the tools for survival by transferring genes among themselves, including genes that allow them to make energy from the air itself. In new research, we studied the genomes of 676 microbe…