Extreme Engineering: How Antarctic Algae Adapt to Hypersalinity.

Photosynthetic organisms can be found across most environments on Earth, including the most extreme ones. The McMurdo Valleys in Antarctica are among the driest and coldest places on the planet, and lakes in that region are permanently covered by 5 m of ice (Priscu et al., 1998). Lake Bonney, one of the McMurdo lakes, is home to a single-cell algal species, Chlamydomonas sp. UWO 241, which can withstand low temperatures, salinity levels exceeding those of seawater, and low light availability caused by the permanent ice coverage. The photosynthetic machinery of this organism is unique: it does not undergo state transitions (Morgan-Kiss et al., 2002), which usually adjust the distribution of light absorption between PSI and PSII.