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Dr. Anna Cho introduces us to breviates, single-celled protists that crawl and swim through mud and other places with little or no oxygen, where most life as we know it couldn't "breathe". She explains how combining initial microscopy and sequencing of interesting-looking single cells from vast sample of many different microbial species allows her to probe the environment for organisms unknown to science. She then uses environmental sequencing methods, reading the DNA of everything in a sample of mud or water at once, to go back and find these tiny cells again and study them specifically. Along the way, we learn that these microbes have reworked their mitochondria, the "power plants" our own cells use to burn oxygen, into stripped-down versions that make energy without it, giving us a window into how life adapts to some of Earth's most unfamiliar environments.
Anna is a postdoctoral researcher at Arizona State University. You can follow her on Bluesky, read her work on Google Scholar, or learn more about her current research.
Links:- Breviates on YouTube
- Breviates and other protists related to opisthokonts (us) by Matt Brown
- Breviatea on wikipedia.
For more info on microbes and to follow updates of this podcast, find @couch_microscopy on Instagram or @couchmicroscopy on Bluesky.
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The views and opinions expressed on this program are those of the host and guests and do not reflect the views of any institution.
