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From natural wonders springs trailblazing science.
BY JARRETT HALEY
owstone
It may be a stretch, but here goes: Everything made possible by modern DNA technology was made possible by Yellowstone National Park.
Specifically, by a particular microorganism— a strain of bacteria that lives in the park’ s many thermal pools and geysers. How it went from the water’ s edge to scientific ubiquity is not only a story of UC San Diego alumni, but a story told by a Triton, Robert Lindstrom’ 73, in his recent book that is also the namesake of this article. It’ s the story of bioprospecting, of finding an organism that unlocked one of the most revolutionary scientific advancements of the 20 th century— which is a pretty remarkable legacy for what the untrained eye might consider just a bright yellow goo.
Whether yellow, orange, red or green— the spectrum of colors in Yellowstone’ s thermal pools and the rest of the the area’ s magnificence is nothing new, of course. It’ s been known as a natural wonder ever since it was Native American land, made the world’ s first National Park in 1872 and now frequented by millions of visitors year after year.
But the first person to take scientific interest in Yellowstone’ s pools was Thomas Brock, a microbiologist whose curiosity was sparked during a vacation in the mid-1960s. Brock returned to place microscope slides in a few pools, and soon enough, the slides were coated in bacteria, one of which Brock named Thermus aquaticus, from the Greek for“ hot water,” a nod to the 170 °-180 ° F-degree environment that makes a perfect home for these golden mats of microbes.
Dubbed Taq for short, it is just one of many microorganisms known collectively as“ thermophiles,” another Greek nod meaning“ heat-lovers.” Brock did his due diligence in cataloguing this new bacterial species by culturing Taq in a lab and placing a specimen in the American Type Culture Collection( ATCC), a national nonprofit that serves largely as a library reference desk for such bioresources. And there Taq remained, waiting for its moment.
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