New Extremophile Cyanobacteria from the Atacama Desert

Sometimes you stumble about things that follow you, you simply can't get rid of them. In this case I isolated a novel cyanobacterial species from stones in the Atacama Desert and it was chasing me. I needed to characterize it. Finally I teamed up with international colleagues and the story became bigger than expected. One thing led to the other, I included two related strains and we ended up publishing a complete emendation of the traditional cyanobacterial genus Gloeocapsopsis.

It took me months to take good micrographs, to study their life cycles and prepare scientific drawings. These results were combined with modern DNA sequencing and phylogenetic analyses and finally we made it. The full story got published as open access in Frontiers in Microbiology.