Nevada hot springs pool produces extreme-heat-tolerant enzyme

Biorefining Magazine
By Luke Geiver July 07, 2011

A microbe found in a Nevada hot springs pool can not only eat cellulose at temperatures above the boiling point of water, but the team of researchers who found the super-bug believe it might be well-suited for extreme industrial biofuels production processes. The team, made up of researchers from the University of California Berkeley and the University of Maryland School of Medicine, found the hyperthermophilic microbe in a 95-degree Celsius pool. The microbe, according to UCB, is only the second member of a group of ancient microbes known as Archaea that are known to grow by eating cellulose above 80 degrees C.

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