The bizarre bubblegum pink color of a distant lake in Western Australia has lengthy been a thriller, however new analysis suggests it’s brought on by a mixture of vibrant micro organism and algae.

Lake Hillier is situated on Center Island off the southern coast of Western Australia. The lake is 600 metres lengthy, 250 metres vast and very salty – about eight occasions saltier than the ocean.

Scott Tighe on the College of Vermont in Burlington grew to become inquisitive about Lake Hillier after seeing it on a tv programme. “I believed, that’s superb. I’ve acquired to recover from there and seize samples and sequence the heck out of it,” he says.

Tighe is a co-founder of the Extreme Microbiome Project (XMP), a world collaboration looking for to genetically profile excessive environments all over the world to find new and fascinating microbes.

He teamed up with Ken McGrath at Microba, a microbial genomics firm in Brisbane, Australia, who visited Lake Hillier to gather water and sediment samples.

Tighe, McGrath and their colleagues analysed the samples utilizing a way referred to as metagenomics, which sequences all of the DNA in an environmental pattern without delay. Highly effective computer systems then tease out the genomes of particular person microbes.

Their evaluation revealed that Lake Hillier accommodates virtually 500 extremophiles – organisms that thrive in excessive environments – together with micro organism, archaea, algae and viruses. Most have been halophiles, a sub-group of extremophiles that may tolerate excessive ranges of salt.

A number of of those halophiles have been vibrant microbes like purple sulphur micro organism; Salinibacter ruber, that are red-orange micro organism; and red-coloured algae referred to as Dunaliella salina. The combination of those microbes, and presumably others, explains the pink color of the lake, says Tighe.

The explanation why these microbes are colored could also be that the purple, crimson and orange pigments they comprise – often called carotenoids – present some safety in opposition to excessive saltiness, says Tighe.

A few of the microbes found in Lake Hillier look like new to science, however they nonetheless must be absolutely characterised, he says.

XMP scientists have additionally sampled different excessive environments, equivalent to Darvaza gasoline crater in Turkmenistan, also called the “Door to Hell”; the Dry valleys of Antarctica; brine lakes which might be 3.5 kilometres underneath the ocean off western Greenland; and Movile collapse Romania.

The workforce is now planning to pattern the Danakil despair in Ethiopia, which accommodates poisonous sizzling springs, and Lake Magic in Australia, which is “so acidic it’s like battery acid”, says Tighe.

Learn extra: Biology’s moonshot: The mission to decode the DNA of all life