Manganese is a transitional model that is able to combine with different molecules, especially small metabolites like nucleosides, amino acids,
The manganese goes over here.
of those manganese oxide stars is a tiny microorganism.
And these manganese forms complexes with small peptides and nucleosides inside the cell.
But what are these manganese complexes?
and the manganese availability.
and intracellular manganese-to-iron ratio through ICPMS and did some optical and electro-microscopy studies.
So the availability of manganese in the environment does not determine radiation resistance.
And it causes the precipitation of that manganese oxide as a byproduct of using other oxidation states of manganese minerals to make its living.
But those that can accumulate high manganese-to-iron ratio, they will have a better chance to be radiation resistant.
Try to put in more manganese.
And the founder, Ben Mangan , one day woke up and he thought, we're getting all this recognition, but, really, there are an estimated 50 to 70 million
And the resistant ones has have high intraceullar manganese-to-iron ratio.
We can see here human cells treated with manganese pyrophosphate is significantly more resistant than the known treated control.
So maybe other organisms could accumulate higher levels of manganese, may have more efficient DNA repair, and may produce antioxidant secondary metabolites
And then we looked into the extracellular and intracellular manganese ratio and compared to the survival
So the cells needs need to have molecular mechanisms to uptake manganese from the environment.
And then they started to see that organisms that accumulate high manganese had these trend of being resistant to radiation.
Actually, it's the ratio between manganese intracellularly.
If you transferred this to this graph here on the right and try to correlate with intracellular manganese-to-iron ratio, you can see there is this general trend
being sensitive organisms, they have a low ratio between manganese and iron intracellularly.
In the case of resistant cells, they accumulate a lot of manganese, manganese-to-iron ratio.
So I've been through the Sonoran Desert in Arizona in a collaboration with a company called American Manganese.
So we were surprised to see high diversity on samples coming from the Atacama Desert compared to samples from the manganese mine in Arizona
of these organisms. So this graph shows that the extracellular manganese-to-iron ratio, the availability of these metals does not determine the survival of organisms
from this environment, but actually, the intracellular manganese-to-iron ratio, there is a trend towards high intracellular manganese-to-iron
And this happens because the inputs, the uptake of manganese, occurs as an active mechanism.
And just in the past few years, that has been elucidated that these manganese complexes helps to protect the proteins against oxidation.
But again, to go back to, for instance, the manganese, mining example, seafloor mining example, we really need resolution at the seafloor at that level
And then the pepper, Kanchan, the chef, used Manganji pepper, which is a cross between the Japanese piman and togarashi, which is a chili.
So one of these factors, maybe the most important physiological factor that factor that contributes for radiation resistance, is the accumulation of manganese.
in the cell. And there are some research already being done by Michael Daly's group using these intracellular manganese
So this motivated us to go through extreme places on Earth, actually deserts, enriched in manganese, so combining the dessication factor
It's the cathode. So in this case, they're using NMC, nickel manganese cobalt.
And the way that I explain this is-- the way of looking at this-- first, the thing that happens is that in that moment, those molecules-- the manganese