Jean Brenchley, PhD, Penn State University
Jean Brenchley, PhD
The long term focus of Dr. Brenchley's research is to examine the diversity and survival of microorganisms in cold environments and weave together information about their identity, habitats, and metabolism. Recently they developed a comprehensive picture of the microbial diversity in ice core samples from the 3 km deep Greenland ice sheet where microbial life and past climates have been preserved chronologically. They recovered a large collection of ultrasmall bacterial isolates that had remained viable for over 100,000 years at temperatures as low as minus 35°C and described novel bacterial species Herminiimonas glaciei and Chryseobacterium greenlandense.
Part of The Investigator's Annexe program.
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References
- Miteva V., Lantz S., Brenchley J. Characterization of a cryptic plasmid from a Greenland ice core isolate and construction of a shuttle vector that replicates in psychrophilic high G+C Gram-positive recipients. Extremophiles, 12, 441-449 (2008).
