[1] T. petrophila was first discovered and isolated from an oil reservoir off of the coast of Japan and was deemed genetically distinct from its sister clades.

Because these organism are found in deep, hot aquatic settings, they have become of great interest for biotechnology due to their enzymes functioning at high temperatures and pressures.

Recently, the textile industry was investigating the fermentative scale up strategy of cloning the α – amylase gene from T. petrophila into E. coli.

[1][6] For the biofuel industry, cellulase enzyme genes from T. petrophila have been cloned and put into E. coli for an enhanced saccharification reaction from softwood dust.

With nitric acid treatment and the transformed enzymes, the results revealed that lignin degradation was more efficiently optimized and that the recombinant cellulases actively hydrolyzed cellulose indicating that this method could potentially be used for better lignocellulosic based bioethanol manufacturing.