Accidental release of a buried monster from a bottle and its springing to life was the subject for the children's stories in earlier days. Recent discoveries of buried microorganisms and their successful culturing in the laboratory are similar to the above stories. Spores of microorganisms preserved alive for thousands to millions of years in amber, remains of mammoth and glacial ice are already known. Recently our scientists have reported deep-sea sediments as another source for such ancient microorganisms.

A number of studies have identified bacteria from such repositories. Studies of such microorganisms have been a matter of interest among the researchers world over because these provide clue to the climate in the past, their DNA structures for possible modification and their adaptations to the archival sites. At times these adapt to new habitats and grow in new environments. In recent times it has been shown that dry spores of terrestrial fungi blown from the Saharan deserts during dust storms seem to have reached the Caribbean Islands in the Atlantic and cause the aspergillosis disease in sea fans.

To find how old the fungal traces were, the scientists used a scale called ‘radiolarian index'. Radiolaria are extremely sensitive to different climatic conditions. Presence of a specific radiolarian species indicates its existence in a specific geologic period (several million years). Based on this index, the sedimentation rate in the Central Indian Ocean has also been worked out to be about 1 cm in 1000 years! This scale helped in identifying age of the fungi in samples. The fungi cultured from 15 to 50 cm depth belonged to the period less than 180,000 years, whereas the fungi at 160 cm depth were approximately 180,000 years old. The fungi at a depth of 370 cm were approximately 430,000 years old. If we compare the cyclicities of the climate during the geological time scale when these culturable fungi were obtained from sediments, we notice three warm and cold climates on Earth. The fungal spores are normally transported during dry and cold periods. Such a correlation gives us a chance to consider these specimens as proxy for the prevailing climate, winds and atmospheric circulation. The scientists also took sufficient care before coming to any conclusions. There was a doubt that the fungal spores might have seeped from surface to the deeper part of sediments. But the dry bulk density studies of sediments indicated that the sediments at 70 cm depth were less porous and therefore there were no chances of seepage of the fungi from surface to deeper layers.

The fungi from the sediments were cultured in nutrient medium. The spores of A. sydowii were germinated at different hydrostatic pressures of 100, 200 and 500 bars corresponding to depth in sea at 1000, 2000 and 5000 metres. The scientists noticed that the fungi germinate least at highest pressures. Thus all evidences for the presence of fungi were confirmed. Earlier studies indicate that the low temperature conditions favour mitigation of DNA damage and therefore the deep-ice cores are better environment for preservation. Likewise, from the present study, scientists feel that the elevated hydrostatic pressure, as in the deep-sea, is another possible mechanism for better preservation.

The scientists are also of the opinion that such fungi may provide an opportunity to understand cellular adaptations involved in long-term survival and allow us a virtual time travel to the past and pick up organisms for potential biotechnological explorations.