Thread: New form of life discovered in California

This. Is. Fucking. Awesome.

During a special press conference Thursday, NASA astrobiologists announced that a team of researchers have uncovered microbes able to subsist on arsenic, which alters the longtime basic formula for life.

Scraped from the bottom of Mono Lake in California and then grown inside a laboratory, the bacteria uses the poisonous substance arsenic as a replacement for phosphorus, the element previously considered an essential backbone for all life.

Though this discovery doesn't not confirm the presence of extraterrestrial life elsewhere in the universe, it does prove the possibility of life forms that can thrive on elements that are unknown or, atypical to life on Earth. "It is building itself out of arsenic," said geo-microbiologist Felisa Wolfe-Simon at NASA's Astrobiology Institute and the U.S. Geological Survey, who led researchers from eight federal and university laboratories conducting the experiment. "All life we know is the same biochemically, and this is a little different. It is suggesting there is another way to be alive."

Hopefully this revelation means our scientific community will be a little less closed minded about what could be out there. What environments and planets that can or cannot sustain life have just been redefined. Not only do we now know about this specific new form of life, but it raises great questions about just what else could potentially be a building block to substantiate life.

"It's life, Jim. But not as we know it."

"Life will find a way."

NASA Discovery: A Key to Life on Other Planets? - TIME

that is awesome... and i never understood the closed mindedness of people when it comes to life being something other than the norm.

closed minded? eh? I've only ever seen scientists saying life on other planets may be so varied as to not even be recognisable as life by our standards. I think you're confusing scientists with creationists ;P

FUCK YEAH, MICROBES! You were born to be alive!

The irony if singing an energetic song about being alive, but putting on a show about as exciting as a wooden plank.

Nice walk there. GREAT WALKING. Oh, a shimmy. He shimmied.

Not sure what took them so long to announce it; it's been around for yonks.

Afaik, discovered two years ago, and then they did two years of lab tests.

Well when your talking about DNA and RNA, its a bitch to work out where this arsenic fits into the genetic code. That might be why it took so long, and also remember that while they might have been able to prove it quickly, they still have to perform experiments that will go against there hypothesis and fail. If you detect so much arsenic in the cell, you could easily draw the conclusion that the bacteria might be using it as some kind of energy source, or in some sort of protein. I would like to know more of how it is using the arsenic as a replacement for the phosphate, if its just where it can fit or replacing every phos.

I've read of instances where bacteria that have replaced a nucleotide can still have a functional base pair, so long as the replaced nucleotide isnt in the coding strand. In human this results commonly in cancer and sometimes other protein mis folding diseases.

However, this is the first instance that I've read about a DNA backbone replacement. This discovery opens a massive can of worms. How will it affect the folding of the DNA, as DNA in bacteria that to be supercoiled with DNA replication and protein production tightly monitored. Any "loose" area result in a larger molecule of DNA inside the bacteria's cytoplasm and thus eating into the cytoplasmic space (bacteria's tommy), but it can also strain the plasma membrane (bacteria cell wall). The other crazy thing about this is how does it affect the proteins that actually bind to the DNA during DNA replication and protein production. Also, is the arsenic only affecting the genomic code, or the bacterial plasmids aswell (if it has any).

most probably the main benefit from this will be some random drug production. Any synthetic drug that you can make in a bacterial system is cheaper and more efficient than a mammalian system. Scientists are always trying to find a new species for this, and it will have its use somewhere. Evolutionarily wise this is pretty big.

Originally Posted by Aegis

closed minded? eh? I've only ever seen scientists saying life on other planets may be so varied as to not even be recognisable as life by our standards. I think you're confusing scientists with creationists ;P

i didn't mention scientists at all in my post i meant people in general.

Originally Posted by Ratty

i didn't mention scientists at all in my post i meant people in general.

sorry, i was referring to rec's OP

Originally Posted by rec

Hopefully this revelation means our scientific community will be a little less closed minded about what could be out there