Life at the dry edge: Microorganisms of the Atacama Desert

The Atacama Desert, located in northern Chile, is the driest and oldest Desert on Earth. Research aimed at the understanding of this unique habitat and its diverse microbial ecosystems begun only a few decades ago, mainly driven by NASA's astrobiology program. A milestone in these efforts was a paper published in 2003, when the Atacama was shown to be a proper model of Mars. From then on, studies have been focused to examine every possible niche suitable for microbial life in this extreme environment. Habitats as different as the underside of quartz rocks, fumaroles at the Andes Mountains, the inside of halite evaporates and caves of the Coastal Range, among others, have shown that life has found ingenious ways to adapt to extreme conditions such as low water availability, high salt concentration and intense UV radiation.

• Publication year

  2012

• Venue

  FEBS Letters

• Publication date

  2012-08-31

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1016/j.febslet.2012.07.025PMID 22819826
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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