Welcome to the Quanta Science podcast. Each episode we bring you stories about developments in science and mathematics. I'm Susan Vallett. The bottom of the ocean is cold, dark, and under extreme pressure. It is not a place suited to the physiology of us surface dwellers.

At the deepest point, the pressure of 36,200 feet of sea water is greater than the weight

of an elephant on every square inch of your body.

Yet Earth's deepest places are home to life uniquely suited to these challenging conditions.

So how do organisms survive there? That's next.

Quantum Magazine is an editorially independent online publication supported by the Simon's Foundation,

to enhance public understanding of science.

Scientists have studied how the bodies of some large animals, such as anglerfish and blobfish,

have adapted to withstand the pressure of the deep sea, but far less is known about how cells and molecules stand up to the squeezing, crushing weight of thousands

of feet of seawater.

Itaibudin studies the biochemistry of cell membranes at the University of California, San Diego.

We know that organisms specialize for different environments on Earth.

We know that animals that live down in the deep sea

are not ones that live in surface waters. They're not ones you'll see in an aquarium. They're

clearly biologically specialized, but we know very little at the molecular level what is

actually determining that specialization, if anything at all.

In a recent study published in science, researchers took the deepest look yet at how cells have adapted to life in the abyss.

In 2018, Budin met Steve Haddock, a deep sea biologist. They combined forces to investigate whether the lipid molecules that cell

membranes are made of could help explain how animals have come to thrive in such a high-pressure

environment. To find out, they turned to comb jellies, the simple, delicate animals that haddock

studies at California's Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.

Douglas Bartlett studies how microbes sustain life at depth and pressure at the University of California, San Diego.

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