Press release -
Discovery of exciting bacteria in underground caves in North Africa
A research team from Umeå University, SLU and Algeria has found bacteria, with a number of interesting properties, in previously unexplored caves at a depth of several hundred meters in Algeria. One of these properties is the breakdown of gluten, which can therefore be of interest to people with gluten allergies. The results are published in Spectrum Microbiology published by the American Society of Microbiology.
“This study is yet another example of the fantastic potential of exciting microbes on our own planet. Despite intensive research, we have so far only managed to map a small part of all microbes found on earth,” says Natuschka Lee, researcher at the Department of Ecology and Environmental Sciences at Umeå University.
When Jules Verne wrote his novel "Journey to the Center of the Earth", many people trivialized the wild fantasies surrounding the existence of life in the underworld. It took several decades before biologists began to seriously explore life underground.
Today, it is known that at least 30 percent of all microorganisms on earth live deep underground – under completely different conditions than the life forms on the earth's surface, for example without sunlight and thus without plants. Research into underground life forms can give us interesting information about how life can develop in different ways on Earth and whether there can be life in the underground on other celestial bodies, such as on the planet Mars.
Caves can act as a natural gateway down to the underworld. Caves are found all over the world, but only a fraction of these have been explored. In the last decade, cave research has received a lot of interest – even in the context of space research, as some planets, such as Mars, have been found to contain many caves.
In the current study, Natuschka Lee in collaboration with Baraa Rehamnia, until recently visiting PhD student from Constantine University in Algeria (who is doing her dissertation on this research topic during the summer of 2022) and Ramune Kuktaite, researcher at the Department of Plant Breeding at SLU in Alnarp, have looked for interesting characteristics of spore-forming bacteria in up till now unexplored caves at a depth of several hundred meters in Algeria.
These bacteria are closely related to the Bacillusgroup, a group of bacteria much studied in astrobiology due to their impressive survival abilities and which on our own planet play a major role in several different contexts, partly as pathogens, partly as beneficial microbes in both ecological and biotechnology contexts.
“For example, we found strains that can produce antimicrobial substances or that can break down gluten, a substance that can cause inflammatory reactions in the intestines of many people. The bacteria were also found to be able to tolerate the extreme conditions found in our digestive system,” says Natuschka Lee.
In the future, the researchers will investigate whether these bacteria can be of use to the biotechnology industry for, for example, gluten allergy.
About the scientific article:
Screening of Spore-Forming Bacteria with Probiotic Potential in Pristine Algerian Caves, Baraa Rehamia, Natuschka Lee, Ramune Kuktaite, Noreddine Kacem Chaouche, Microbiology Spectrum, DOI https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/spectrum.00248-22
More information:
For more information, please contact:
Natuschka Lee, Department of Ecology and Environmental Sciences at Umeå University
Email: natuschka.lee@umu.se
Phone:+46 70 375 12 13
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Umeå University is one of Sweden’s largest institutions of higher education with over 36,000 students and 4,000 faculty and staff. The university is home to a wide range of high-quality education programmes and world-class research in a number of fields. Umeå University was also where the revolutionary gene-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9 was discovered that has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
At Umeå University, distances are short. The university's unified campus encourages academic meetings, an exchange of ideas and interdisciplinary co-operation, and promotes a dynamic and open culture in which students and staff rejoice in the success of others.
