One man's trash (or deadly poison...)

[Mikey]

Bacterium found which incorporates environmental arsenic.

"There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy."

[SolkaTruesilver]

Darn. When I heard NASA's department of Astrobiology would be issuing a statement this morning, I was hoping for some ET bacterias..

Oh well. A new structure of life form is still interesting. I hope they really juice out this discovery and can create nifty stuff with it.

[Nickswitz]

Oh well. A new structure of life form is still interesting. I hope they really juice out this discovery and can create nifty stuff with it.

I hope they leave it alone and allow it to live where it does and not bother it too much, I mean is it cool, yeah, but does it really mean much besides the fact that humans really know very little about the world they live on, no, not really.

[Mikey]

Yeah, I don't know that this is something we need to harvest and dominate. It does mean, however, that we no longer need to limit the search for ET life to Earth-clone planets.

[SolkaTruesilver]

What I meant, maybe such life structure could be reproduced in some biolabs, and with that, we could have entirely new brands of very interesting bacterias to work with in biology.

Such discovery, once properly understood, could very well revolutionnise bioengineering theories for the next years.

edit: "Juice it" = exploit the acquired knowledge to its full capacity, not the bacteria itself

[Tyyr]

What this does is just keep expanding our definition of "life" and therefore the number of places we could find it. For a long time we assumed that life needed sunlight. Nope, you just need energy, the form is pretty much inconsequential. Need carbon... no wait, silicon could theoretically work almost as well. Well surely... shit, you can have a living thing that needs arsenic the way we need phosphorus.

At this point I think we'd probably be safest saying that so long as an energy source is present life is a possibility because it just keeps getting weirder.

[Tsukiyumi]

At this point I think we'd probably be safest saying that so long as an energy source is present life is a possibility because it just keeps getting weirder.

Makes it way easier on us sci-fi writers.

[Mikey]

What makes it weird (and wonderful) isn't that it needs arsenic instead of phosphorous... it's that this bacteria can use either depending on the environmental conditions.

[Sonic Glitch]

What makes it weird (and wonderful) isn't that it needs arsenic instead of phosphorous... it's that this bacteria can use either depending on the environmental conditions.

Yes.. about that
Linky

When NASA announced the discovery of an arsenic-eating microbe in a California lake last week, the agency hailed it as a suggestion that life as we know it, well, isn't life as we know it.

"We have cracked open the door to what is possible for life elsewhere in the universe," Felisa Wolfe-Simon of the NASA Astrobiology Institute and U.S. Geological Survey, who led the study, said at a news conference.


NASA's team of astrobiologists had taken samples of the bacteria from mineral-dense Lake Mono -- in a volcanic region of Northern California near the Nevada border -- and starved them of phosphate, the meal of choice for most DNA-based organisms. Instead, the scientists force-fed the bacteria a form of arsenic, and, much to the researchers' surprise, the bacteria continued to grow and flourish on their new diet of poison.

But then other scientists began digging into the paper outlining NASA's research and findings, and they're now charging that the research behind it is flawed.

"I was outraged at how bad the science was," University of British Columbia microbiology professor Rosie Redfield told Slate's Carl Zimmer. Redfield also posted a scathing critique of the report on her blog.

Redfield and other detractors point out that when NASA scientists removed the DNA from the bacteria for examination, they didn't take the steps necessary to wash away other types of molecules. That means, according to the critics, that the arsenic may have merely clung to the bacteria's DNA for a ride without becoming truly ingrained into it.

The report's detractors also note that the NASA scientists fed the bacteria salts that contained trace amounts of phosphate, so it's possible that the bacteria were able to survive on those tiny helpings of phosphate instead of the arsenic.

"This paper should not have been published," University of Colorado molecular biology professor Shelley Copley told Slate's Zimmer.

So why would NASA scientists make such a big deal out of a discovery that, according to critics, they must have suspected was questionable?

"I suspect that NASA may be so desperate for a positive story that they didn't look for any serious advice from DNA or even microbiology people," UC-Davis biology professor John Roth told Zimmer.

A NASA spokesperson brushed off the criticism. The paper's authors have not responded to the firestorm. Needless to say, that posture, too, has drawn the ire of critics. "That's kind of sleazy given how they cooperated with all the media hype before the paper was published," Redfield said.

[Mikey]

I'll reserve judgement on Redfield et. al. until I can see exactly how he observed the NASA lab work.