14 DAY TRIAL // A team of researchers from the Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research (MPI-MR) announce the discovery of a class of organisms that apparently cannot survive without rare earth elements, some of the most precious materials out there.
These elements are used for a variety of high-tech applications, including the construction of advanced electronic devices, headphones and speakers, tablets, smartphones, wind turbines, and laptops.
The investigators found that the bacterium Methylacidiphilum fumariolicum, which dwells in hot springs, requires the rare earth elements lanthanum, cerium, praseodymium, and neodymium to synthesize an enzyme called methanol dehydrogenase, Astrobiology Magazine reports.
This enzyme is critical for the microorganism's ability to produce energy. M. fumariolicum can survive in highly-acidic environments, enduring pH values of below 1 (that of sulphuric acid). The hot springs they occupy feature temperatures of 50 to 60 degrees Celsius (122-140 degrees Fahrenheit).
Previous studies have determined that the type of methanol dehydrogenase this bacterium uses is very common in coastal water bacteria, which implies that rare earth elements may be crucial to the survival of many more species of microorganisms than first thought.