NASA finds new life

I'm gonna ask my bio professor what they think. Might as well as the chem prof too, since As is in the same column P and has some different orbitals and whatnot.

I think the talkative one said that they're not really sure what the extent of As is in them.

Man, this could be a whole new DNA sequence. She also just said that it's possible that some might nucleotides might be As based and others O based.

yeah i understand dude... what i'm saying is that setting in stone "life cannot come about in different ways than this" would be very poor inductive logic. as in, taking the logical form of "i have only seen life as x before, therefore all life is x." very weak logically, when you look at the big picture

i'm not attacking them or saying they're dumb for being surprised, or that this isn't a fascinating, amazing and important discovery. i'm just questioning the notion that we would never find life that isn't structured as we know it so far

Yep, its confirmed. I hate that bitch.

It's just the notion that we haven't really been looking in places where life as our own could not exist. So it is very boundary-pushing stuff.

Our own planet amazes me to no ends.

yeah. shit's crazy, especially when you realize how very little we really know

I dig what you're saying now. I've kind of always thought that if intelligent aliens have visited our planet before they must have something different about their biological structure/the resources where they live that gives them the abilities to travel that far through space. So kind of a similar idea.

yeah dude, when talking about other life forms and deep space, all bets are off. we don't have any reason to KNOW 100% that we'll even be able to SEE them, just for a dumb example. space and life forms and consciousness and senses are so fucking trippy..

agreed. I heard her say that when she first found this out she thought she did something wrong. While thats possible, it's no way to think. If everyone did that we might not know lots of stuff we do now. Maybe people actually did this now and a a result, we don't know something we should.

you shittin me?

if anyone even remotely believes either of those topics are on the same level of importance (regardless of whatever their stupid as opinion is) then they need to get a fucking grip

I guess you failed that unit in basic science class called elements...

yeah, it's usually not so consequential in most every day things but people fall victim to poor inductive logic every day. i mean it's HUGELY important for us because for most of our day to day things high probabilities are more than enough/pivotal for our intents and purposes, but in science, biology, space etc, poor inductive logic can be a shot to the foot

GAH nevermind, you know more than you let on..

haha, did you think I meant where arsenic was found, or where did they find it? I guess internet words can be confusing.

I'm a bio major and genetics of viruses and bacetria whatnot interest me a lot. We have a mass spectrometer at my school they should come here to measure stuff! they've probably got better ones at like harvard or something.

No, I didn't read very well, I thought you said "what is arsenic" hehe..

Pretty much every research 1 institution has one. I know we do too.

This. Is. Insane. I'll just mark my territory here.

Sweet! MAYBE WE CAN BE FREINDS

lol @ some of the comments on gizmodo, like this one:

 

I guess people should start throwing out what the learned in bio...

stoked to see how the world reacts if they even react at all/

absolutely nuts


some more info on it

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GFAJ-1

sdag;alsjdg;asdg jas;dghasdgj;asdh ga

what the fuck

Wait so how does this disprove or alter evolution?
I confus.

hmm still on safari here but the temptation to switch to the fox is getting stronger and stronger..

So basically NASA took a trip to Mammoth and got lucky haha

All life on the planet is comprised of H, C, N, O, P, and S. When we look for life on other planets we've typically thought that we need to find planets that have H,C,N,O,P, and S. Now that they've found this bacteria that is able to replace P with As. P you might know, is super important as it provides the energy our cells live off of (ATP or Adenosine triphosphate). As is poisonous because its similarity to P allows it to replace P it in our cells while providing less energy. This bacteria not only uses As for energy, but has also replaced P in its DNA.


This makes us go back to the drawing board in terms of what are the necessary conditions for life. Our understanding of chemistry doesn't explain how the As could be incorporated in DNA (hence this experiment will need to be repeated and verified). Also, when we're looking for other planets that might have life on them, we can expand the parameters of which elements are necessary to support life.

hey, you think that anything in the same column as P can be used as the phosphate group in DNA since it has the same valance and might create the same shape? Shapes are really important in organic molecules for those of you unaware.

Does this mean that water may not be necessary to support life?

woah..

what is water?

i want a plasma rifle

Official news from NASA's website

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/astrobiology_toxic_chemical.html

Skepticism over discovery
Steven Benner, a distinguished fellow at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Gainesville, Fla., remains skeptical.

If you "replace all the phosphates by arsenates," in the backbone of DNA, he said, "every bond in that chain is going to hydrolyze [react with water and fall apart] with a half-life on the order of minutes, say 10 minutes."

So "if there is an arsenate equivalent of DNA in that bug, it has to be seriously stabilized" by some as-yet-unknown mechanism, Benner said.

Benner suggests that perhaps the trace contaminants in the growth medium Wolf-Simon uses in her lab cultures are sufficient to supply the phosphorus needed for the cells' DNA. He thinks it's more likely that arsenic is being used elsewhere in the cells, in lipids for example.

"Arsenate in lipids would be stable," said Benner, and would "not fall apart in water." What appears in Wolfe-Simon's gel-purified extraction to be arsenate DNA, he added, may actually be DNA containing a standard phosphate-based backbone, but with arsenate associated with it in some unidentified way.

The discovery of GFAJ-1's unusual abilities suggests a number of avenues for further research. One obvious one is to see whether any other organisms can perform similar biochemical tricks.

Wolfe-Simon "would be very unlikely to have just found the only arsenic life-form on Earth on the first try. So it's got to be the tip of a very large iceberg," Davies said.

And indeed, Wolfe-Simon said she is already growing "14 or so other isolates" from Mono Lake on a phosphorus-free diet high in arsenic. They may be the same organism she's already identified, they may not. "I don't know anything else about them, except that they grow under similar conditions."

Meanwhile, Wolfe-Simon has ordered stock cultures of several previously identified Halomonas organisms, close relatives of GFAJ-1 on the genetic tree, all known to be arsenic-tolerant. She plans to test whether they, too, can survive in a phosphorus-free environment.

She's also interested in finding out whether GFAJ-1 is actively employing its arsenic-incorporating ability in its natural state. "You want to know, is this biology being done in the environment or is it some very bizarre thing, like a hat trick [that it does only] in the lab."

And Davies suggests it would be interesting to search in "an environment that has very little phosphorus and lots of arsenic" for an organism that requires arsenic to survive, "for which phosphorus would be the poison." Mono Lake, he pointed out, "has phosphorus as well arsenic."

These and other investigations will help to clarify how extensive a role arsenic plays both within GFAJ-1 and in terrestrial biology as a whole.

But while some scientists may reserve final judgment about Wolfe-Simon's conclusions until further details can be clarified, even Benner concedes that "If that organism has arsenate DNA, that is a world-class discovery."

Wolfe-Simon's research is funded by the NASA Exobiology/Evolutionary Biology program.
http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2010/1202/How-does-an-arsenic-based-life-form-work-exactly

fucking awesome!

so pumped when they make new discoveries like this.

And to think, kids in my class don't think aliens exist.

I <3 science.

this is actually old news that NASA re-released, probably to cover something up. it's working.

MAKE ME.

It has already been found that there are some microorganisms in mud flats in Europe that need H2S (Hydrogen Sulfide) to survive, instead of water.

Basically, yes, life without water. And they aren't bacteria, they are multicellular organisms.

http://www.physorg.com/news189836027.html

probably started similarly to the way carbon based life form started