bio

Extremophile

An organism - almost always a microbe - that thrives in conditions that would kill most life: boiling water, deep cold, strong acid, extreme salt, or environments saturated with toxic metals. They chart the outer edge of habitability and are the first place astrobiologists look when asking how much life can endure. The Mono Lake bacterium of the "arsenic life" affair was an extremophile: it tolerated arsenic, it did not build its genome from it.