Just saw this on sci.astro:

1.08.2006 - Biologie
Colwellia ist echt cool
Die Mikrobe betreibt noch bei minus 200 Grad Celsius Stoffwechsel.
http://www.wissenschaft.de/wissen/news/268486

Here's a translation:

========================================================
11.08.2006 - Biology
Colwellia is genuinely cool

The microbe still operates with minus 200 degrees Celsius metabolism.

A bacterium named Colwellia gives still weak signs of life of itself at temperatures of minus two hundred degrees Celsius. If this is made possible by special antifreeze and enzymes, which produce the microbes and which they protect against frost damages, researchers of the university of Washington pointed to Seattle. This discovery does not only show, which extreme minus degrees can bear terrestrial organisms, they throw also a completely new light on the possibility of extraterrestial life on icy heavenly bodies.

From a row types of bacteria it is well-known that they get along problem-free with temperatures of minus twenty degrees Celsius. They live in the ice in tiny liquid vesicles, which are hardly larger than them. The bacteria separate into these vesicles substances, which have similarity with Xanthan. In addition, this substance is used in the foodstuffs industry as thickener, can prevent the formation from ice crystals to a temperature of minus two hundred degrees.

So far the scientists had assumed below a temperature of minus twenty degrees Celsius no more metabolism is possible. But the results with Colwellia push this border now far to the rear. So a group of researchers could show around Karen boy of the university of Washington for example that the microbes themselves form proteins at the temperature of liquid nitrogen still. In addition the biologists supplied some Colwellia cultures with the radioactively marked protein component Leucin and examined afterwards whether in the bacteria proteins with these marked components were. They came to the amazing result that the bacteria insert small quantities of Leucin actually still with minus 196 degrees Celsius into proteins.

A second researcher team of the university in Seattle examined those scarcely 5,000 genes of the ice bacteria, in order to come the special substances on the trace, which lend its strength to the microbes against cold weather. The scientists encountered a whole set of hereditary property goods, on which information for the education was deposited by extremely effective insulation for cold proteins, explain Jody Deming, chief of the working group.

These results demonstrated not only the extreme adaptability of terrestrial organisms, but let also the existence of extraterrestial life appear very many more probable than so far meant. The frozen stores of water Mars come now likewise in principle as habitat for micro organisms into question like the ice tank of the Jupitermonds Europe.

New Scientist, 12 August, S. 35
========================================================