Thursday, December 9, 2010
About the "discovered" bacteria
On the news, it states scientists "discovered" a bacteria that's life was based on arsenic. WRONG. They coaxed the bacteria in a lab to use arsenic instead of phosphorus. But how is that an interesting news story?
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This is why it is interesting:
ReplyDeleteArsenic is notoriously poisonous to almost all forms of life. But an organism found in the mud of California's Mono Lake can live and grow entirely off this deadly chemical -- raising hope that similar creatures could exist in even more hostile environments, far from planet Earth.
The new finding, announced Thursday morning by scientists at NASA-Ames and Menlo Park's U.S. Geological Survey, describes how a bacterium takes a startling detour from normal metabolism, swapping the common element phosphorus for toxic arsenic, and flourishes.
"This is a microbe that has solved the problem of how to live in a different way," said Felisa Wolfe-Simon of Palo Alto, the young NASA astrobiology fellow at USGS who led the effort, during a Washington news conference.
The discovery of such odd life in our own backyard is a big boost for those searching the skies for extraterrestrials.
Such research findings prove that "shadow" creatures live in extreme environments previously thought uninhabitable. So here are the provocative questions posed by this finding: Are there other microbes than can do this? And could such creatures evolve into intelligent life, elsewhere?
Previously, scientists assumed that phosphorus is one of six essential components for the survival of all creatures. By that logic, any planet without that element could not sustain life.