Biosensor it affects marine organisms, especially plankton (floating microorganisms) and viruses that attack plankton. Plankton form the base of the marine food chains and are believed to affect our planet's temperature and weather by uptake of CO for photosynthesis. Deneb Karentz, a researcher at the Laboratory of Radio-biology and Environmental Health (University of California, San Francisco) has devised a simple method for measuring ultraviolet penetration and intensity. Working in the Antarctic Ocean, she submerged to various depths thin plastic bags containing special strains of "E. coli" that are almost totally unable to repair ultraviolet radiation damage to their DNA. Bacterial death
Microbial mat the causes, cyanobacteria are the most self-sufficient of the mat organisms and were well-adapted to strike out on their own both as floating mats and as the first of the phytoplankton, which forms the basis of most marine food chains. The time at which eukaryotes first appeared is still uncertain: there is reasonable evidence that fossils dated between and represent eukaryotes, but the presence of steranes in Australian shales may indicate that eukaryotes were present . There is still debate about the origins of eukaryotes, and many of the theories focus on the idea that a bacterium first became an