New Zealand's hot springs are tourism drawcards - but they could also be hiding huge yet-to-be-made scientific discoveries. Photo / File
New Zealand's hot springs are tourism drawcards - but they could also be hiding huge yet-to-be-made scientific discoveries. Photo / File
Scientists have completed a sprawling stocktake of New Zealand's postcard hot springs, revealing a wealth of new insights.
But the most exciting discoveries could be still to come, with potentially colossal secrets lying within the heat-loving bacterium that somehow survive around the bubbling pools.
Under the million-dollar effort dubbed the 1000 Springs Project, a small team of researchers spent two years sampling hot pools across the Taupo Volcanic Zone, which took in most of the North Island's geothermal wonders.
The teams used specially-designed poles to lower high-temperature flasks into the pools, before filtering the collected samples to capture the tens of thousands of micro-organisms within them.
Next, the DNA was extracted, sequenced using cutting-edge technology, and compared against an international database.
Waikato University microbiologist Professor Craig Cary, who led the Government-funded study with Dr Matt Stott of the University of Canterbury, said no one had ever attempted such a project here.
"From a scientific perspective the geothermal pools are a huge untapped and undescribed resource," Cary said.
"There is also a history of economic value in the geothermal world, so it's true to say we have not known the value of what we have."
Just a few examples of applications for micro-organisms included breaking down cellulose to make ethanol for biofuels, or using them to generate anti-microbial agents for thermo-stable antibiotics.
One Nobel Prize-winning discovery was the application of an enzyme from Thermus aquaticus, a species of bacteria found in Yellowstone National Park that scientists used to effectively photocopy DNA and is now one of the most important tools in molecular biology.
Cary, Stott and their team looked at the biogeography of the bacteria and archaea in the pools, what was driving their distribution, and the importance of the spring's chemistry and physical conditions.
They started off with some straightforward questions: why was one pool just meters away from another so different, and what was in there?
"There are literally geochemical parameters governing the composition structure in the different pools," Cary explained.
"Nobody ever had a biogeographic sense of that - and we do now."
The pools ranged in temperature from 18C to a scorching 100C.
While we humans can't tolerate a bath any hotter than 40C, some of the "extremophile" bacteria in the pools were comfortable in temperatures as hot as 90C.
The hardy bugs could even thrive in water with the pH level of ammonia, and salinity as intense as sea water.
Samples from each pool had since been through DNA extraction, with researchers finding about 28 thousand different microorganisms.
Dr Matt Stott, of the University of Canterbury, collects a sample from a hot spring. Photo / Jean Power, GNS Science
Cary described this as an amazing amount of diversity - and that was just at the genus level, with species and strain still to be explored.
"It is just the tip of the iceberg on the dataset, in terms of what questions we can answer," he said.
"My dream is to do all one thousand metagenomes. All the DNA from all of our pools is sitting here, ready to be explored."
Cary said indigenous rights and knowledge were very much at the forefront of the team's minds and work practices.
"We could never have done this without iwi co-operation. They took us into some very inaccessible and unique sites, that are cherished and very important in terms of tribal knowledge.
"It was a great learning experience for us, as the project was underway and we entered into more negotiations with iwi, we all developed a huge appreciation of not only harnessing that knowledge, but protecting it."
Stott, who began the project under GNS Science, said the work was first conceived as merely a microbiological stocktake of one of New Zealand's iconic environments.
But what had come out of it had proven much more, with benefits for everything from tourism and conservation to Maori knowledge and science.
It had proven the largest and most comprehensive landscape scale geothermal study ever undertaken, and its value was still to be fully tapped.
The next step may be analysis down to the genome level, where the true uniqueness of the microorganisms lay.
Cary said each step would have to be carefully planned, in collaboration with iwi.
"We need to protect that knowledge for the future."
