Thermus aquaticus

That was like a, you know, maybe 2018, 2019.

And then the pandemic came around and the story of the bacterium Thermus aquaticus that was found in mushroom pool at Yellowstone and helped enable the PCR test that we're all very familiar with.

That's probably the best known story in the whole book.

And I said, okay, we've got the lead over there.

But I certainly didn't realize that PCR, Polymerase Chain Reaction, that all of that is thanks to a discovery that happened at Yellowstone in 1966 because of a bacteria that was living found somewhere it shouldn't have been.

Just briefly walk through that story because it's crazy.

Yeah, so the case of Thomas Braque, the scientist here, and Thermus aquaticus, the bacteria, is just like a textbook story of a curious scientist.

All he really was interested in was what's the upper temperature limit for life? You know, another basic science question like how old is the Earth? And so Yellowstone turns out to be maybe the best, but certainly one of the best places on Earth to look for that.

So we kind of make use of that and we say, "Okay, now let's do it outside the body, and we'll target specific areas." So that's how we can start with just a couple of cells, go through all these cycles, and at the end we have millions or even billions of copies.

Where Yellowstone comes into play with all of this is there's a specific enzyme called Thermus aquaticus that was found in the Mushroom Pool in Yellowstone.

It is an enzyme that can withstand very high heat, right? So all these hot springs and everything in Yellowstone, these enzymes has, have evolved to be able to survive there.

So that, the reason that's important in forensics is when we're doing all these copying, this copying of DNA, the first thing we have to do is heat up the DNA.

That's, and then that's when the DNA expands.

If we were using a regular enzyme that's in our bodies, when it got heated up to 94 degrees, that enzyme would be completely denatured, couldn't use it, and the cycling would stop.

So now when Taq enzyme, Thermus aquaticus, was discovered, now we can throw that Taq into that tube.

It c- it can withstand the high heat.