To reside a comfortable life on the earth, a temperature of round 25° to 30° C is good. But throughout a warmth wave, the place temperatures can cross 40° C, the implications will be lethal. Humans and most complicated multicellular organisms should not constructed to tolerate such warmth.
That doesn’t imply no dwelling factor can, nevertheless.
Bacteria known as thermophiles (which means “heat lovers”) have been identified to tolerate 45° to 70° C of warmth. Such a excessive temperature may give human pores and skin third-degree burns.
While such an atmosphere could seem hellish to folks, thermophilic micro organism see a possibility. Places on the earth with temperatures like this — together with hot springs, deep-sea thermal vents, and compost piles — supply a mineral-rich neighbourhood with comparatively few competing life varieties. To acquire an edge, some thermophilic micro organism produce potent antibiotics as weapons to neutralise their rivals.
This is strictly why scientists have deemed hot springs world wide to be unexplored mines of antibiotic-producing micro organism. For instance, thermophiles remoted from hot springs within the Asir and Jizan areas of Saudi Arabia have been found to supply quite a lot of potent antibiotics efficient towards gram-positive pathogenic micro organism.
The hot springs of India should not very properly studied, nevertheless.
But pushed by their putative worth, researchers at the Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT) in Tamil Nadu examined the Rajgir hot spring lake in Nalanda district of Bihar. Their findings have been revealed final month within the Indian Journal of Microbiology.
Exploring microbial variety
“People take holy baths in these hot spring lakes, thinking diseases can be relieved,” Okay.V. Bhaskarrao, professor at VIT and corresponding creator of the examine paper, mentioned. “As a microbiologist, I know that along with the elements that are present in the water, some of the microorganisms can also be responsible for this so-called curative activity.”
Studying which microbes are current in these hot spring lakes is difficult as a result of researchers have to gather water and soil samples from a hot atmosphere. At Rajgir, the temperature of the water can go as much as 45° C, and the soil close by can vary between 43° and 45° C.
After gathering the samples, the researchers recognized the microorganisms current in them, for which they used 16S rRNA metagenomics. This approach depends on figuring out the 16S rRNA gene, which is found in all microbes however has slight variations throughout species, thus serving to scientists to determine micro organism precisely.
Researchers found many species of micro organism however one group that significantly caught their consideration was the Actinobacteria, which made up 40-43% of the microbial variety at the lake. Bacteria belonging to this group are identified producers of antimicrobial compounds. Well-known medication like streptomycin and tetracycline have been first found because the merchandise of Actinobacteria.
“Hot springs studied till now showed very little diversity of Actinobacteria: — sometimes it is like 20% — but in our study I saw them to be abundant at Rajgir,” Aparana Kumari, a PhD scholar and first creator of the examine, mentioned.
Discovering antibiotic-producing micro organism has change into extra urgent within the period of antimicrobial resistance — a silent epidemic fuelled by the unwarranted use of antibiotics. Bacteria have responded by growing methods to withstand the medication, lowering the latter’s efficiency. One consequence is the rising value of healthcare, since a number of antibiotics could also be required to deal with a single an infection. The World Health Organisation has projected antimicrobial resistance will add as much as $1 trillion in healthcare prices worldwide by 2050.
Additionally, on common, pharmaceutical industries have been identified to require a decade to carry novel antibiotics to the market whereas micro organism develop resistance in a lot much less time.
Thus, the invention of any bacterium that may produce a potent antibiotic towards pathogens is taken into account excellent news. Not all thermophiles produce antibiotics, nevertheless, and to seek out out which of them do, the VIT researchers performed an antibacterial effectivity experiment.
They cultured the potential micro organism with totally different pathogenic strains: Escherichia coli, Salmonella typhimurium, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Staphylococcus aureus. If the take a look at micro organism might inhibit the expansion of the pathogenic micro organism on a tradition plate, it was affirmation that an antimicrobial compound was being produced.
In this fashion, the crew was capable of determine seven strains of Actinobacteria that produced potent antimicrobials towards a number of pathogens.
Going a step additional, researchers aimed to isolate the precise antibacterial compounds produced by these micro organism. In one other paper revealed in Chemical Papers, an antibacterial compound was efficiently extracted from a bacterium recognized as Actinomycetales bacterium spp., obtained from the Rajgir hot spring. (While the Chemical Papers examine was revealed earlier than the Indian Journal Microbiology one, the work it describes got here after.)
This bacterium produced a spread of compounds. To isolate the one with antibacterial activity, the researchers used gasoline chromatography mass spectrometry, a complicated approach to separate compounds primarily based on their chemical properties.
The compound was found to be diethyl phthalate and it inhibited the expansion of Listeria monocytogenes, a pathogenic bacterium that causes listeriosis, a deadly foodborne an infection. This discovering means that diethyl phthalate might doubtlessly be developed as a drug towards L. monocytogenes infections.
Industrial, agricultural potential
The potential of thermophiles goes past antibiotics: they’ve many purposes throughout industries. For instance, the PCR take a look at — broadly in use throughout the COVID-19 pandemic to examine for the virus’s presence — requires an enzyme that was first found in a thermophile known as Thermus aquaticus.
A 2018 examine in Frontiers in Microbiology by Banaras Hindu University researchers reported {that a} cocktail of micro organism from a hot spring within the Chumathang space of Leh district has the flexibility to advertise plant development. Associate professor and the examine’s lead creator Jay Prakash Verma mentioned hot-spring strains are efficient for industrial and agricultural purposes due to their heat-tolerant properties.
Mohit Nikalje is an IISc alumnus and a science communicator primarily based in Bengaluru.
Published – June 04, 2025 05:30 am IST
