Sulfolobales: Acidothermophilic archaea as models for biology and biotechnological applications

Abstract

Archaea of the order Sulfolobales are the earliest extremophiles discovered. They inhabit acidic terrestrial hot springs worldwide. Since their discovery, these microbes have attracted the attention of scientists studying molecular biology and microbial resources. Their evolutionary closeness to Asgard archaea and eukaryotes, the availability of genetic toolboxes for several species, and unique metabolic pathways make them ideal microbes for studying the biology of archaea and the origin of eukaryotic features, as well as platforms for synthetic biology and potential industrial applications, such as biomass degradation and bioleaching. This review summarizes recent advances in the study of Sulfolobales biology and discusses their biotechnological applications with a specific focus on biomass degradation using obligate heterotrophic Sulfolobales species.

Keywords

Archaea / Sulfolobales / Acidothermophile / Archaea biology / Biomass degradation and transformation

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Pengju Wu: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Investigation. Qi Gan: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Investigation. Haodun Li: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Investigation. Shikuan Liang: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Investigation. Yunfeng Yang: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Investigation. Shuai Li: Investigation. Yan Xie: Investigation. Qihong Huang: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft. Xu Feng: Writing – review & editing. Guanhua Yuan: Writing – review & editing. Jinfeng Ni: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Funding acquisition. Yulong Shen: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Supervision, Funding acquisition, Conceptualization.

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