halophile

(thing) by The Alchemist Fri Jun 23 2000 at 20:34:36
Salt loving creatures (prokaryotes only, really) that live in environments as extreme as the dead sea where it is 1Molar salt. If you are not impressed by this, you should be as these poor things have to actively pump out ions from their cells. An important halophile is the purple acid patch bacteria that have a light / rhodopsin ion pump. This was used extensively in experiments to find out how membrane ion transport works.

See : extremophile

(thing) by BioTech Sun Feb 09 2003 at 6:41:13
Any organism that lives or thrives in a salty environment.


From the BioTech Dictionary at http://biotech.icmb.utexas.edu/. For further information see the BioTech homenode.

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