LEEDS, England (Commonwealth Union) – Researchers have found how a chemical in the cells of marine organisms permits them to survive the high pressures in deeper oceans.
The deeper the sea creatures live, the greater the inhospitable and extreme the environment they have to sustain. In one of the deepest areas in the Pacific the Mariana Trench, 11 km under the sea surface where the pressure is 1.1 kbar. That is a 1,100-fold elevation of the pressure experienced at the Earth’s surface.
For atmospheric pressure, water molecules arrange in a tetrahedron-like network. Increased pressure, via, the network of water molecules starts to disfigure and change shape. When this takes place in water inside living cells, it blocks important bio-chemical processes from being carried out killing the organism. The study revealed the researchers in Leeds have for the 1st time been able to explain how a molecule seen in the cells of marine organisms restrains the effect of external pressure on the water molecules.
Professor Lorna Dougan, from the School of Physics and Astronomy at Leeds, stated that life has adjusted to survive and thrive in environmental pressure in the deep ocean where organisms exist under elevated pressure that can be destructive to human life. She also stated that elevated pressures disrupt the liquid water that lives in all life, bringing in destructive effects to the biomolecules that underpin all biological procedures.
“We need to understand what happens to water under pressure and how pressure-adapted organisms combat these effects. If we can understand how these organisms survive at extreme pressure, we can apply these findings to the wider study of biomolecular stability” Professor Dougan said.
From the findings, the researchers were able to produce an “osmolyte protection ratio”, which forecasts the amount of Trimethylamine N-oxide needed in the cells of marine organisms so they can survive at a particular depth in the oceans.
