Life pushed to extremes: chromosome segregation in hyperthermophilic Archaea

Archaea evolved as the third domain of life billion of years ago, but they are a relatively recent addition to the map of the tree of living organisms. Archaea are unicellular organisms that populate our planet together with bacteria and eukaryotes. From a functional and mechanistic standpoint, archaea are a mosaic of tesserae from bacteria and eukaryotes. Hyperthermophilic archaea are super microbes thriving at 80ºC and higher temperatures and exhibiting unusual properties, which make these organisms valuable for the development of novel biotechnological applications, but also extremely interesting for basic studies on life pushed to extremes. To date no information is available on the fundamental process of chromosome segregation in archaea. Genome segregation is a crucial stage of the life cycle of every cell: the genetic material is duplicated, then separated and equally distributed into the two daughter cells. We intend to analyze this process in the hyperthermophilic archaeon Sulfolobus solfataricus, whose genome harbours genes that encode excellent candidates for a chromosome segregation machine. The project will involve molecular biology, genetic, biochemical and biophysical approaches in parallel to fluorescence microscopy to image chromosome morphology and segregation in S. solfataricus cells.