Image: Wikimedia Commons
When the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill dumped around 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico back in 2010, something called Alcanivorax borkumensis was used to eat away at the oil in the cleanup efforts. It’s apparently not widely known that the spill could have been much worse without these oil-eating bacteria available to feed on crude oil and natural gases during disasters.
The microbe lives all over the world, using hydrocarbon molecules for food and therefore preferring oil-ravaged areas. And the significance of this is that bacteria like A. borkumensis breaks down as much as 80 percent of various crude oil compounds in both water or soil, which are made of a wild number of different molecules. In theory, scientists could keep something like this stored in an oil-rich pool where it will thrive, then deploy the bacteria in the ocean when a disaster happens somewhere in the world.
According to a new study published in the Microbiome Journal, scientists found a super version of a similar bacteria sitting at the bottom of the ocean. They sent bottles and corers into different parts of the Mariana Trench and collected samples from as deep as seven miles below the surface, finding the hydrocarbon-eating bacteria in a greater proportion there than any other part of the world. When they brought these new bacteria back they were tested in a lab and found they “very efficiently consumed” the same hydrocarbons A. borkumensis feasted on after the Deepwater Horizon spill.
“How the microorganisms survive this environment is still a mystery and this is another of our key future research questions,” Jonathan Todd, a biologist from the University of East Anglia in the UK and a co-author on the study, told Business Insider.
