ISLAMABAD, July 29: The Yellowstone National Park in the United States has yielded a new marvel, an unusual bacterium that converts light to energy.

The discovery was made in a hot spring at the park where colourful mats of microbes drift in the warmth.

“This thing was just bizarre,” David M. Ward, a professor of Microbial Studies at Montana State University, said of the bacterium, ZEE news reported.

Plants use photosynthesis to turn light into energy, of course, and so do some other bacteria.But, Ward said, the newly discovered type has “a new kind of photosynthesis. It uses the same kind of machinery, but has the parts in a different arrangement.”

The find is going to be important for unravelling the history of photosynthesis, in determining how microbes efficiently harvest energy, he said in a telephone interview.

“We’re running out of fossil fuel, so the more efficiently we can harvest light energy the better,” Ward said.

Discovery of the microbe, named candidatus chloracidobacterium thermophilum, is reported in an issue of the journal Science.

“Finding a previously unknown, chlorophyll-producing microbe is the discovery of a lifetime,” co-author Don Bryant, a professor of biotechnology at Penn State University, said in a statement.

“I wouldn’t have been as excited if I had reached into that mat and pulled out a gold nugget the size of my fist.”—APP