Deal Over Microbe Hunt at Yellowstone Draws Heat

Towering mountain ranges, sylvan lakes and explosive geysers don’t make for a traditional laboratory setting. But here at Yellowstone National Park, new definitions are in order as the nation’s historical frontier is transformed into a new frontier of biotechnological research.

In this burgeoning world, you go where the molecular gold is. That means the practice of bioprospecting in Yellowstone’s 10,000 hot springs, geysers, fumaroles, boiling mud pots and other thermal features, where unique single-cell creatures bask in the heat. Within the park’s steaming caldrons, scientists are discovering just how talented those organisms are.

Yellowstone’s thermal fields have become a hot spot for locating cutting-edge microbes. These hearty organisms live in superheated environments such as the park’s geysers and highly acidic hot springs and produce much-sought-after enzymes known as “extremozymes.” Researchers predict a massive growth in the uses of extremozymes, believing any enzyme robust enough to exist at boiling temperatures and in harsh acid would be ideal for use as high-temperature detergents and industrial bleaches, to gobble up gunk in the processing of oil and to clean up toxic waste.

And now, after more than two years of legal challenges, the park is poised to cash in on future bioprospecting finds. But not everyone welcomes the partnership between a national park and a commercial interest, arguing that a commercial contract the park has entered into amounts to plundering a public treasure.

What Yellowstone offers to bioprospectors is variety and access. There is more genetic diversity in one of the park’s tiny bubbling pools than in all the reserve’s 2.2 million acres.

Officials say at least 15 other national parks contain good potential for bioprospecting. The public-private agreements hammered out here, they believe, are going to be the model not just for other parks but for all publicly managed land.

John Varley, director of the Yellowstone Center for Resources, who oversees scientific activity in the park, negotiated the first-ever profit-sharing agreement between a national park and a scientific research company. In 1997, he agreed to a contract with the San Diego-based biotechnology company Diversa Corp., which is also bioprospecting in Iceland and Costa Rica. The pact gave Diversa the right to extract small samples from the park in return for a reported $100,000 over five years. In addition, the company would provide equipment and training to park scientists and an undisclosed percentage of future profits gleaned from Yellowstone’s creatures.

A coalition of environmental and scientific groups filed suit against the park service and the Department of the Interior. The lawsuit challenged the agreement on the basis of environmental and intellectual property laws. Others criticized the secrecy and lack of public input surrounding the agreement.

“Bioprospecting in our national parks represents a private expropriation of these public resources,” Jonathan King, a molecular biologist at MIT, wrote about the pact.

In May, the park service cleared a major hurdle when a federal judge in Washington upheld the agreement. But there remains a freeze on implementation of the Diversa contract or any other until the National Park Service produces an environmental impact statement, expected in about a year.

The park has been allowing research within its boundaries for more than 100 years, and the agreement would not expand the scope of any research, just cut the park in on the profits, officials say. For its part, Diversa received broad access to a diverse and uncharted microbial territory: Fewer than 1% of Yellowstone’s microbes have been identified.

“Everyone thinks that we are entrepreneurs because we have poor budgets,” Varley said, chuckling. “This is not envisioned as a moneymaking thing. In an average scenario, I would hope that the program would pay for itself.”

The microscopic gold rush at Yellowstone began in 1966, when microbiologist Thomas D. Brock discovered organisms where no one dreamed living creatures might exist: in a smelly 176-degree caldron called Mushroom Springs.

That minuscule single-celled creature, called Thermus aquaticus, packed a massive scientific punch. The cigar-shaped microbe produces an enzyme that scientists covet for its ability to hold together in extreme temperatures and for its knack for copying DNA strands ad infinitum.

The enzyme, known as Taq polymerase, led directly to the development of the test for DNA fingerprinting. In 1993, Kary Mullis, the scientist who used Taq to devise a method to decode DNA, won a Nobel Prize in chemistry.

The Taq polymerase has proved a hugely lucrative item for its owner, the Hoffman-La Roche pharmaceutical firm, which holds the patent and takes in an estimated $100 million a year in revenue from it.

The Supreme Court has ruled that organisms found in nature may not be patented. Indeed, Thermus aquaticus can be found in many hot water heaters. It is the use of the microbes that is usually patented.

Bioharvesting in some form has always existed at the park. Researchers have been issued permits to collect biological samples at Yellowstone since 1898. More and more scientists, however, are asking to poke around for extremozymes. Park officials say that, of the 300 research permits currently issued, about 20 are issued to bioprospectors.

The gene hunters skimming these scummy pools are hoping, of course, to discover the next great multimillion-dollar microbe, although such a find is an acknowledged longshot. Still, Varley notes that so far 13 organisms have been discovered in Yellowstone that have proved useful in biotechnology.

Ann Deutch, a park biologist, is clearly enthralled with the single-celled creatures she gleefully calls “creepy-crawlies.” Her job managing the researchers brings her continually in contact with the vast colonies of organisms that give the park’s springs and geysers their vivid crayon colors. Individual microscopic organisms cannot be seen--it would require more than 100 billion to fit in a pencil eraser. But when they conglomerate, deep oranges, purples and blues signal their presence.

Deutch is in awe of the critters’ ability to survive, and even thrive, in the extremes of heat and acidity in which they are found. Here, there are pools of liquid with a pH of less than 1, making battery acid seem a benign substance by comparison.

Researchers have found that, in addition to being tough, the microbes are versatile. “Generally, we find that if a guy has one ability, he’ll have a few. For example, if he can survive at high temperatures, he can also withstand radiation, which is really handy in medical research,” Deutch said on a tour of thermal sites.

Scientists seldom go far off the tourist trails to collect their samples, which can consist of a single vial of liquid. Varley said that the groups that charge bio-piracy don’t understand the tiny amounts of material scientists remove from the park.

“They are less invasive than the fishermen at the Yellowstone River,” he said. “Most tourists carry out more of the park’s biomass on the bottom of their hiking boots than the prospectors take.”

Among current projects at Yellowstone: A research firm in Bozeman, Mont., has been given a grant by the Navy to try to find an extremozyme capable of removing paint from old jet planes; NASA scientists are examining the park’s geothermal landscape to determine how future Mars missions will conduct sample collections; and, in the world of ancient microbiology, organic chemists from around the world are studying the “chemical fossils,” or primordial ooze found here.

Varley offers one example of benefit gained from the agreement with Diversa. At the park’s request, the company has put together a DNA pedigree of Yellowstone’s founder wolves and their offspring, a research tool that the cash-strapped park could not hope to compile.

“There’s no way we could afford to do that, and they can do that in their sleep,” he said. “We can use these companies for all sorts of help. Why isn’t that a good thing?”