Francisco Mojica, who was born nearby, earned a doctorate here in 1993 studying the genes of this creature. And he noticed something rather odd. Hidden in part of its genome was a distinctive sequence of the same thirty letters, repeated over and over again, each repeat being separated by a sequence of 35–39 letters that was different in every case. The repeat sequence was often a palindrome – it spelled the same text backwards and forwards. Mojica looked in another, related salt-loving microbe and found roughly the same pattern, though with a different sequence.
