REAL LIFE NEWS: TITANIC INCUBATES NEW BACTERIA
by Hazed
And speaking of shipwrecks, a brand new species of bacteria has been discovered in the wreck of the HMS Titanic. It's been named Halomonas titanicae, and it's turned up in "rusticles", which are porous and delicate icicle-like structures that form on rusting iron.
Samples of rusticles were gathered in 1991 by a robotic submersible, and researchers from Dalhousie University and the Ontario Science Centre in Canada and the University of Seville in Spain isolated the hitherto unknown bacteria from those samples. They sequenced the DNA and thus discovered that the microbes constituted a new member of the salt-loving Halomonas genus.
This is not just of academic interest: these bacteria may shed light on the mechanism by which rusticles form, and thus on the general "recycling" that such microbes carry out on submerged metal structures. This could have relevance to the protection of offshore oil and gas pipelines, and the safe disposal at sea of ships and oil rigs.
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