Heat-Tolerant Amoeba Breaks Eukaryote Record at 63°C, Cracked Mostly With RNA-seq and AlphaFold2
NikoMcCarty · x · 2026-09-24
Researchers found an amoeba in California's Lassen Volcanic National Park that divides at up to 63°C (145°F), breaking the previous eukaryote record of 60°C (bacteria can grow at 100°C).
How they figured it out
- Because the cells are hard to culture, the paper relies mostly on computation and ML: RNA sequencing to pull the 500 most abundant transcripts, then AlphaFold2 to predict protein structures.
- These proteins have fewer hydrophobic amino acids on their surfaces, making heat-induced clumping (the egg-white mechanism) less likely.
- An ML model called TemBERTure predicted the proteins stay folded at much higher temperatures than other eukaryotes' proteins.
- The amoeba also upregulated protein-maintenance genes (proteasomes) and DNA repair genes.
The author notes that simple culturing of organisms from weird places + RNA-seq + heavy computational analysis is enough for real discoveries — and asks what the true upper temperature limit for eukaryotes is, noting many biophysics breakthroughs came from pondering such theoretical limits.
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