Congratulations to Marina Monserrat, Max Dreer, Christa Schleper and Melina Kerou for their new article in Frontiers in Microbiology:

 "Environmental distribution, physiology and genomic adaptations of arctic ammonia-oxidizing archaea"

Slow and steady!

After 15 years of continuous cultivation, we finally isolated the first psychrotolerant ammonia-oxidizing archaeon (AOA) from an arctic environment, Ca. Nitrosocosmicus articus.

Originally starting with a generation time of ~ 30 days, it is now at a lighning-fast ~ 16 days. Representing one of the two dominating AOA clades in arctic environments, which we corroborated by assessing AOA diversity across arctic soils spanning half of the circumpolar Arctic by linking 16S rRNA and amoA taxonomies, N. arcticus represents the unique opportunity to study Arctic nitrification in the light of ongoing climate change.

Read the full article here: Environmental distribution, physiology and genomic adaptations of arctic ammonia-oxidizing archaea

Original paper:

Díez MM, Dreer M, Schleper C and Kerou M (2026) Environmental distribution, physiology and genomic adaptations of arctic ammonia-oxidizing archaea. Front. Microbiol. 17:1722591. doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2026.1722591