In the Patagonia region of southern Chile, there are “living rocks.”

While that’s what the locals say, Veronica Godoy-Carter, associate professor of biology and biochemistry at Northeastern University, says it’s a little more complicated than that.

“They’re actually little mountains,” she says, of “giant biofilms that are billions of years old. Literally billions.”

Source:

Whole-genome sequencing of a Janthinobacterium sp. isolated from the Patagonian Desert

https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mra.00600-24