Talk:Pyrobaculum aerophilum

Description

Pyrobaculum aerophilum is a microaerobic marine member of the genus Pyrobaculum, a rod-shaped family of hyperthermophilic archaea. It grows optimally at about 100 degrees celsius at neutral pH, and is a facultative autotroph. This species is unusual in its high degree of metabolic flexibility: it is able to utilize nitrate, ferric iron, arsenate, selenate, thiosulfate, or oxygen as terminal electron acceptors in respiration. It grows best anaerobically on nitrate, or aerobically in the presence of 2.5-5% oxygen. The complete genome was released in 2002, having been decoded and annotated essentially single-handedly by Sorel Fitz-Gibbon, a member of the Jeffrey H. Miller lab at UCLA. The complete genome is 2.22 million base pairs long, and contains approximately 2587 protein coding genes, and over 100 non-coding RNA genes.

Pyrobaculum aerophilum represents a potential model organism to study the biology of Crenarchaea (currently the genus Sulfolobus is the favorite crenarchaeal model). In the year 2006, three additional species from the Pyrobaculum genus will be decoded by the Department of Energy (P. islandicum, P. calidifontis, and P. arsenaticum). A fourth species, Thermoproteus neutrophilus, which should technically be classified as another Pyrobaculum species, will also be decoded at the same time. This will provide one of the most comprehensive comparative genomics data sets in Archaea to aid in studying the biology of this species.

Genome browsers can be found for this species at the UCSC Archaeal Genome Browsers[1] and the Integrated Microbial Genomes database[2] at DOE