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• Main Authors: Frances H. Arnold, Patrick L. Wintrode, Kentaro Miyazaki, Anne Gershenson
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Antarctic; Antarc*
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.638.6392; http://www.che.caltech.edu/groups/fha/publications/Arnold_etal_TIBS_2001.pdf

In places previously regarded as incapable of sustaining life, such as Antarctic ice fields and volcanic pools, organisms are now being identified for whom these extreme environments are home, sweet home. In most cases, adaptation to such extreme environments has not required completely new molecular machinery; in fact, many ‘extremophilic’enzymes are similar to their counterparts from the ‘mesophilic’ environments we find more hospitable. For example, enzymes that function at very different temperatures can have nearly superimposable three-dimensional structures (Fig. 1). Sequence comparisons indicate that these enzymes are derived from a common ancestral enzyme and have accumulated mutations that allow them to adapt over millions of years.