Look out, smartphone users: Bacteria may be after your rare earths. A microbe that lives in one of Earth’s harshest environments, sulfurous volcanic mud pits, needs one of several industrially valuable metals to make a vital enzyme. While rare earth elements have been found previously in plants and microbes, the mud-pit bacterium is the first organism known to need them for survival.
Methylacidiphilum fumariolicum makes its home in volcanic pools outside Naples, Italy, where it endures steaming-hot temperatures and mud as acidic as lemon juice. Scientists led by Huub Op den Camp, a microbiologist from Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands, discovered the bacterium in 2007 and brought it back to the lab, where they had trouble getting it to survive in their standard growth medium. The bacterium thrived only when the scientists added water from its original home.