Figure Caption: The Salton Sea and surrounding agricultural fields in California’s Imperial Valley. The Sea’s unique combination of high salinity, frequent anoxia, and extreme eutrophication supports numerous previously unknown microbes. In the Jan. 18, 2005 print edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, University of Oregon professor Michelle Wood and colleagues from The University of Montana and Arizona State University describe a unique photosynthetic bacterium from the Salton Sea that has evolved through a natural process of genetic transfer between distantly related microorganisms. Discovered by lead author Scott Miller while working as a graduate student in Wood’s laboratory, the organism is related to the cyanobacterium Acaryochloris marina. A. marina lives in pristine regions of the South Pacific, inside the tissue of a type of invertebrate animal called a ‘sea squirt.' Wood and Miller speculate that the ability of their new organism to live a free and independent lifestyle, without dependence on a plant or animal host, is facilitated by the very rich environmental conditions of the Salton Sea. LANDSAT image courtesy of NASA, USGS and the Global Land Cover Facility (University of Maryland); processed by Norman Kuring (NASA). The article was published in the online edition of PNAS on Jan. 6, 2005