For decades, extremely halophilic archaea – microorganisms that thrive in salt concentrations far exceeding seawater – have been valued mainly for their extraordinary resilience. A newly published study, co-authored by Carla C. C. R. de Carvalho of iBB’s 2BRG group, suggests these extremophiles have another trick up their sleeve.
The researchers collected brine and sediment samples from hypersaline sites scattered across Eurasia through the salt lakes of Russia’s Kulunda Steppe, the marine salterns of Samouco in Portugal and Trapani in Italy, and the salt production fields of Nha Trang and Cam Ranh in Vietnam.
Using enrichment cultures, they went looking for organisms able to grow on hyaluronic acid as their sole source of carbon and energy: a glycosaminoglycan best known for its structural role in skin, joints and connective tissue, and prized by the cosmetics and biomedical industries.
They found it. The isolates that thrived on hyaluronic acid turned out to belong to new species within the genera Natronoarchaeum and Haloarcula, the first haloarchaea ever shown capable of using this compound as an energy source. It’s a small discovery with a big implication: even within one of biology’s most extensively studied groups of extremophiles, entire metabolic pathways were still waiting to be found, with potential relevance for biotechnological applications such as the biodegradation of hyaluronic-acid-based biopolymers.
The study is published in Frontiers in Microbiology: doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2026.1846936