IT SURVIVES on a food so unrewarding it needs help disposing of its waste. Eking out an existence only by turning the normal chemistry of life back to front, the bacterium Syntrophus aciditrophicus is one of the most extreme-living organisms known. Now its genome has been sequenced and is yielding clues as to how it survives. It might even help us make hydrogen from waste.
Robert Gunsalus of the University of California, Los Angeles, and colleagues identified 3169 genes in Syntrophus. The bacterium performs a key part of the carbon cycle by breaking down fatty acids – used by…
