Apr 30, 2026 · 13 min · 14 segments
In a hot spring at Yellowstone National Park, a microbe does something that life shouldn’t be able to do: It breathes oxygen and sulfur at the same time. The story The Cells That Breathe Two Ways…
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A flow of air has rushed into your lungs, where the oxygen moves into your bloodstream, fueling metabolic fires in cells throughout your body.
You, being an aerobic organism, use oxygen as the cellular spark that frees molecular energy from the food you eat.
Instead of using oxygen to harvest energy, many single-celled life forms that live in environments far from oxygen's reach, such as deep-sea hydrothermal vents or stygian crevices in the soil, use other elements to respire and unlock energy.
This physical separation of the oxygen-rich and oxygen-free worlds is not merely a matter of life utilizing available resources.
Oxygen doesn't play nice with the metabolic pathways that make it possible to respire with the use of other elements, such as sulfur or manganese.
It gives aerobes like us life, but for many anaerobes, or creatures that respire without oxygen, oxygen is a toxin that reacts with and damages their specialized molecular machinery.
Courtney Staires, an evolutionary biologist at Lund University in Sweden, says while we love oxygen, it's actually a pretty harmful molecule for most of life on our planet, and even ourselves.
Staires says we can't imagine life without it, but life is actually quite hard with it.
A flow of air has rushed into your lungs, where the oxygen moves into your bloodstream, fueling metabolic fires in cells throughout your body.
You, being an aerobic organism, use oxygen as the cellular spark that frees molecular energy from the food you eat.
Instead of using oxygen to harvest energy, many single-celled life forms that live in environments far from oxygen's reach, such as deep-sea hydrothermal vents or stygian crevices in the soil, use other elements to respire and unlock energy.
This physical separation of the oxygen-rich and oxygen-free worlds is not merely a matter of life utilizing available resources.
Oxygen doesn't play nice with the metabolic pathways that make it possible to respire with the use of other elements, such as sulfur or manganese.
It gives aerobes like us life, but for many anaerobes, or creatures that respire without oxygen, oxygen is a toxin that reacts with and damages their specialized molecular machinery.
Courtney Staires, an evolutionary biologist at Lund University in Sweden, says while we love oxygen, it's actually a pretty harmful molecule for most of life on our planet, and even ourselves.
Staires says we can't imagine life without it, but life is actually quite hard with it.
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