If you had to name the most epic, mindboggling bacteria in the world, Deinococcus radiodurans would come to mind. D. radiodurans is the most DNA damage-tolerant organism ever discovered. It's able to survive 2,000 to 6,666 times the gamma radiation that would kill a human and 250 to 5,000 times the UV radiation we use to kill microbes in our water supply. Luckily, it has no pathogenic qualities nor interacts with any other organism as far as scientists know. Armed with near immortality, this bacterium is currently being developed to treat radioactive waste. In the US, there are around 3,000 radioactive waste sites from nuclear weapon production; the estimated cost to clean them with current methods is $265 billion sparking an interest in research investigating cheaper alternatives. In the past 10 years, strains of D. radiodurans have been created with a gene cloned into them providing ionic mercury resistance. This allows them to not only flourish in these radioactive sites, but to grow on ionic mercury and detoxify it, helping remediate these waste sites. Recently, other researchers have engineered strains of these bacteria to express acid phosphatase, which allows the bioremediation of aqueous nuclear waste that results from reprocessing spent fuel rods (heavy in beta and gamma radiation), and another gene to precipitate uranium.
Original article: Chitra Seetharam Misra, Deepti Appukuttan,Venkata Siva Satyanarayana Kantamreddi, Amara S. Rao and Shree Kumar Apte. (2012). Recombinant D. radiodurans cells for bioremediation of heavy metals from acidic/neutral aqueous wastes. Landes Bioscience 44-48
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