Introducing the Fire Amoeba - with Angela Oliverio and Beryl Rappaport

Eukaryotes are "complex" organisms with nuclei and membrane-bound organelles: plants, animals, fungi, and protists. Protists include many understudied lineages of fascinating organisms that challenge our understanding of cell biology, and so many protist species remain undiscovered. This week Dr. Angela Oliverio and Beryl Rappaport come on the podcast to discuss a new amoeba species called Incendiamoeba cascadensis that lives and reproduces at the highest temperature ever described for a eukaryote, earning the title of "fire amoeba". Angela and Beryl take us through their research and discovery process, highlighting the collaborative nature of their groundbreaking work. You can read about the structure, function, behavior, and genome of I. cascadensis in their recent preprint. On the episode, we discuss what this amoeba looks like, how it moves, its relatives, the volcanic lake it was found in, and current hypotheses for how it is able to survive in such hot temperatures. Angela explains how studying a novel species like this can leave us with more questions than answers which means that there is more exciting work to come! 

Angela Oliverio is an assistant professor of Biology at Syracuse University and Beryl Rappaport is a PhD student studying microbial eukaryote evolution and occasionally fermented foods in the Oliverio lab. You can follow them on Bluesky at @oliverio.bsky.social and @hbrappap@bsky.social, and learn more about their research at http://oliveriolab.org/ and their Google Scholar pages (Angela, Beryl). 

They've also provided some links and photos for further reading, and make sure to read their preprint!

1. A great thread by Beryl
2. A geothermal amoeba sets a new upper temperature limit for eukaryotes preprint
3. Extreme environments offer an unprecedented opportunity to understand microbial eukaryotic ecology, evolution, and genome biology perspective paper 
4. Lessons from Extremophiles: Functional Adaptations and Genomic Innovations across the Eukaryotic Tree of Life article
5. Popular media articles about the fire amoeba in Nature and Scientific American
6. More about amoebozoan amoebas: Wikipedia
7. Brief history about Thermus aquaticus (bacteria) and the advent of PCR from USGS

For more info on microbes and to follow updates of this podcast, find @couch_microscopy on Instagram or visit www.couchmicroscopy.com/store for merch!

The views and opinions expressed on this program are those of the host and guests and do not reflect the views of any institution.