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A MILE AND A HALF below the surface, Alvin creaks softly as it approaches the ocean floor off the coast of Oregon. On board is biology professor Anna-Louise Reysenbach, who studies organisms that live in one of Earth's most extreme environments: deep-sea hydrothermal vents. Reysenbach uses the sub to collect microbes that could advance medical and nano technology and hold the key to life's origins. "You don't know what to expect," she says. "It's almost like going to Mars or the moon."
For the past 11 years, Reysenbach has brought prestige, hundreds of thousands of grant dollars, and a passion for understanding and cataloging elemental life to Portland State. The South Africa native travels the world studying microbes in high temperature and high pressure environments. These microscopic bacteria are more diverse and older than any other form of life.
The microbes, Reysenbach says, are nature's chemists. "They're able to break down almost anything," she says, "even some very recalcitrant things."
Heat-loving organisms like these have been used to clean up oil spills and the toxic drainage from mining operations. Minerals produced by the microbes could even be used in cutting-edge nanotechnology as microscopic raw materials.
"If you look at places humans haven't explored much, the possibility of new industrial or medical applications is greatly enhanced. There's a whole candy store out there," says Reysenbach. But the microbial ecologist's main focus is on the microbes themselves. "What organisms are there, which ones colonize first, and what they are doing?" she asks.
TO LEARN MORE, Reysenbach brings samples back from the inhospitable environments where the microbes live using the Navy-owned submarine Alvin, which was used to find the Titanic and can dive up to 2.8 miles. It can carry two scientists and a pilot and in November 2009, Reysenbach rode in Alvin to investigate vents at the bottom of the Gulf of California. She has also used remotely operated submarines, similar to those involved in the response to the BP oil spill. Back in the lab, Reysenbach and her team reproduce the temperature and pressure conditions of the microbes' native habitat to better understand the bacteria and their genetic makeup.
Some of the microbes have never been studied before. Reysenbach and her colleagues discovered Aciduliprofundum boonei off the coast of Tonga, and named it after the late PSU professor David Boone. Under a microscope, the organism looks like a balloon with two little horns. "I call it the thermal devil blob," she says.
Reysenbach has also studied microbes at vents in the Indian Ocean, all through the mid-Atlantic, and in several regions of the Pacific. Microbial life also flourishes in the hot, acidic waters around geysers, which has sent Reysenbach to collect samples at geysers in Iceland, Kamchatka (Russia), and Yellowstone National Park.
Just recently the National Science Foundation has again taken notice of the work of Reysenbach and her colleagues at PSU, granting the Biology Department an award to fund laboratory renovations. "They recognized our critical mass of research working with extreme environments," Reysenbach says.
Eric Gold is a master's student in the creative writing program at Portland State.
Professor Anna-Louise Reysenbach (top photo) climbs out of the three-person submarine, Alvin (bottom photo), which is deployed from the support ship Atlantis (second photo).
