General Information: Its genome indicates a motile, sporulating, sulfate-reducing, chemoautotrophic thermophile that can fix its own nitrogen and carbon by using machinery shared with archaea. Candidatus Desulforudis audaxviator is a gram positive sulfate reducing bacteria identified in fracture water from a borehole at a depth of 2.8 km in a South African gold mine. Water from these boreholes is very old (low-biodiversity fracture water), suggesting that these bacteria have been isolated from the Earth's surface for as much as several million years.