Bacteria With Arsenic-Based DNA Discovered
Holy crap.
I heard NASA was having a big new conference today with some relevance to xenobiology...but I didn't realize it'd be this big.
The universe is a strange and fascinating place.
Holy crap.
I heard NASA was having a big new conference today with some relevance to xenobiology...but I didn't realize it'd be this big.
The universe is a strange and fascinating place.
posted by Winston Smith at
2:53 PM
7 Comments:
Something I'm unclear about in the several articles I've read about this - did they find this bacteria on Earth or, like, a asteroid or something?
Found it in a lake in California.
Time to start looking for the Horta.
Multiple points for sweet ST:ToS reference...
Gizmodo is badly wrong about this. This is a standard - although arsenic-tolerant - terrestrial bacterium with standard DNA that, in an experimental environment, has shown novel chemistry, to wit, substituting arsenic for phosphorus. This itself is not too weird, since arsenic is in the same group as phosphorus and thus would be expected to have similar chemical reactions.
The xenobiological wonder the scientists express is completely speculative. Here's a scientist with his feet a little more firmly on the ground than the Gizmodo writer:
“It’s a really nice story about adaptability of our life form,” [Gerald Joyce, a chemist and molecular biologist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif.,] said. “It gives food for thought about what might be possible in another world.”
... but cool just the same.
Damn, I actually wondered about this when I read the first snippets about this story...wondered, that is, whether the arsenic basically leached in or what... But subsequent, longer summaries made it sound as if these bacteria represented a radically different evolutionary line.
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