A team of scientists is providing additional information about two types of microbial communities found in the Dry Valleys of Antarctica: microorganisms that survive in permafrost, and endolithic microbes that survive within rocks. A new paper in the journal Environmental Microbiology entitled, “ Comparative activity and functional ecology of permafrost soils and lithic niches in a hyper-arid polar desert,” details the genomic potential of these communities to adapt to the cold and arid conditions found at high elevation in the Antarctic Dry Valleys.

The new study expands on previously published work, in which the team identified little microbial activity happening in the permafrost itself, while endolithic life thrived inside nearby rocks. The team’s recent paper, “Nearing the cold-arid limits of microbial life in permafrost of an upper dry valley, Antarctica,” was published in The ISME Journal.

The work was supported in part by the Astrobiology Science and Technology for Exploring Planets (ASTEP) element of the NASA Astrobiology Program. ASTEP was an active program element from 2001 to 2014 and supported investigations focused on exploring Earth’s extreme environments to learn how best to search for life on other planets. The types of projects that were funded by ASTEP are now competed under Planetary Science and Technology from Analog Research (PSTAR).

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