Chlamydia is a common sexually transmitted disease. It is caused by the bacteria Chlamydia trachomatis . It can infect both men and women. Chlamydia infection is estimated to be present in 8-10% of young people. And it’s also at the bottom of the Arctic .
And it is that a new study published in Current Biology has described nuclei of Chlamydia trachomatis that live here in conditions devoid of oxygen, at high pressure and without an apparent host organism.
Chlamydia trachomatis
An international group of researchers reports the discovery of numerous new species of Chlamydiae that grow in deep sediments of the Arctic Ocean, in the absence of obvious host organisms. The researchers had been exploring microbes that live more than 3 km below the ocean’s surface and several meters in the sediment on the ocean’s seabed .
As Jennah Dharamshi of Uppsala University in Sweden and lead author of the study explains:
Finding Chlamydiae in this environment was completely unexpected and of course raised the question of what the hell they were doing there.
Chlamydia spend much of their life inside the cells of their human hosts, and other organisms. Most of the knowledge about Chlamydiae is based on studies of pathogenic lineages in the laboratory. This new research, however, shows that chlamydia can be found in the most unexpected places, l or that it may provide new insights into how chlamydia became pathogens in humans and animals .