The Arctic Bacterium That Eats Acetone and Breathes In Carbon Dioxide
In the freezing waters of the Arctic Ocean, food is hard to come by. Nutrients are scarce and usable organic matter is thin on the ground. Yet life finds a way — and scientists have just found a bacterium with a way nobody had seen before.
The bacterium is called Porticoccus arcticus, and it lives in the Beaufort Sea, just north of the Yukon in the Arctic Ocean's Canada Basin. In a study published in Nature Communications on 3 November 2026, researchers at Concordia University in Canada describe how it survives: it uses acetone — a common chemical in seawater, and the same chemical found in nail polish remover — to pull carbon dioxide out of the water and turn it into the building blocks it needs to grow.
Eating like an animal, fixing carbon like a plant
Most living things get their carbon in one of two ways. Animals eat food that already contains carbon. Plants take carbon dioxide from the air and build it into sugars using sunlight. Porticoccus arcticus does something in between.
Through a process called acetone carboxylation, the bacterium combines acetone with carbon dioxide to make compounds that feed straight into its central metabolism — the chemical pathways at the heart of the cell. "This acetone-mediated inorganic carbon assimilation combines what animals do — eating food, in this case, acetone — with what plants do: fixing CO2," the researchers explain.
There is a second surprise as well. The bacterium can also use light as an energy source while still eating organic carbon — a combination called photoheterotrophy. So it harvests light for energy, eats acetone for carbon, and fixes carbon dioxide at the same time. It is a three-way survival strategy for waters where almost nothing else is on the menu.
How they found it
The team, led by Susan McLatchie and colleagues, did not grow the bacterium in a dish. They found it through genomic evidence — reading the DNA of microbes sampled from Arctic seawater and spotting the genes for the acetone pathway. The study describes both discoveries together: a new group of organisms with this unusual metabolism, and the acetone pathway itself, which had not been seen in marine bacteria before.
Why does it matter? The Arctic Ocean is changing fast as the climate warms, and understanding how its smallest inhabitants make a living helps scientists predict how the whole ecosystem will respond. It also shows students something important about biology: the textbook categories — eater, photosynthesizer, and so on — are neat, but real life is messier and more inventive.
If your child is curious about the living world — from microbes in icy seas to the carbon cycle that connects every living thing — a first lesson in biology can start with this tiny Arctic survivor and end with how life adapts to the harshest places on Earth. Book your first lesson
Sources:
- McLatchie, S. et al., "Evidence of an acetone carboxylation pathway in photoheterotrophic bacteria from the Arctic Ocean", Nature Communications, 3 November 2026. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-78082-y: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-78082-y
- phys.org, "A type of Arctic Ocean bacteria may be using acetone to turn carbon into food", 3 November 2026: https://phys.org/news/2026-11-arctic-ocean-bacteria-acetone-carbon.html
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