Suck on this, carbon-based life forms:
At its conference today, NASA scientist Felisa Wolfe-Simon will announce that NASA has found a bacteria whose DNA is completely alien to what we know today. Instead of using phosphorus, the bacteria uses arsenic. All life on Earth is made of six components: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. Every being, from the smallest amoeba to the largest whale, shares the same life stream. Our DNA blocks are all the same.
But not this one. This one is completely different. Discovered in poisonous Mono Lake, California, this bacteria is made of arsenic, something that was thought to be completely impossible. While Wolfe-Simon and other scientists theorized that this could be possible, this is the first discovery. The implications of this discovery are enormous to our understanding of life itself and the possibility of finding beings in other planets that don’t have to be like planet Earth.
Update: h/t Origuy.
Update update. h/t Zandar too.
polyorchnid octopunch
I for one welcome our new arsenic overlords!
LikeableInMyOwnWay
Frank Capra is rolling over in his grave.
beltane
If this isn’t mentioned in the Bible I’m not buying it.
Xecky Gilchrist
NASA has found a bacteria
…which defies the laws of plural-formation in any known language.
licensed to kill time
Where’s the bacteria made of old lace?
DougJ
@LikeableInMyOwnWay:
I realize it’s not my best title, I couldn’t think of anything good to rhyme with old.
Judas Escargot
Clearly a case of Arsenic Capture.
Calouste
It’s actually “suck on this, phosphorus based lifeforms”. arsenic replaces phosphorus (same column in the periodic table, so chemically similar), not carbon, in the bacteria’s body chemistry.
Dexter
An exciting discovery for the nucleic acid biochemistry field. Raises a lot question about how the evolution of nucleic acids occurred. However, I read her Science paper (where this was reported). The data is pretty thin and inconclusive for such an extraordinary claim.
The press conference was pretty bad though, she behaved as if she is in a high school drama class.
freelancer
Wait til Eric Cantor hears about this!
Cuccinelli will just be pissed that God didn’t tell anyone about this in Genesis, therefore it needs to be defunded.
Talk about a party of lifeforms who should be forced to metabolize arsenic. Can’t wait till the GOP implodes.
LikeableInMyOwnWay
@DougJ:
It’s fine, I’m just in a mood today.
kdaug
Not quite a second Genesis (it appears to be an evolutionary adaptation), but pretty astounding nonetheless.
Chyron HR
I have so many questions. Are they peaceful? Will they take our jobs? Are they Islamists? ARE THEY SHARIA LAW JIHADOONS?
J.W. Hamner
You should probably change your link to a post put up after the Science embargo… like this one. Since yours is a little misleading… they didn’t “discover” bacteria with arsenic in their DNA, they made it.
S. cerevisiae
It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it.
Seriously, this is cool. There was a commenter on here that broke this last night but I wanted to see an official source.
Dexter
@J.W. Hamner: Actually they did discover a bacteria with arsenic in their DNA.
THE
OK I’ll repost this appropriate Tom lehrer song on this thread without my last error.
Yes It substitutes As for P.
Neat trick though.
martha
Wow. Mother Nature is playing a really, really ironic joke on the mouth breathers with this find… I always knew she had a sense of humor.
Redshirt
I made an Arsenio Hall joke, here. Just couldn’t help myself. Pretty pictures!
Dexter
Official source:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2010/12/01/science.1197258 (subscription only)
Corresponding Science magazines news article:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/330/6009/1302.short
J.W. Hamner
@Dexter:
No they did not. Read the article.
AdamK
This is the lamest kind of exaggerated, dumbed-down science reporting I’ve ever seen. The bacteria was modified, and a lot of people doubt the analysis. Ridiculously overblown.
Redshirt
@kdaug: I’d like to see this clarified, since it seems like a big deal: Evolutionary adaption? Or second “Genesis”. A second creation event is of far more importance in my mind.
John List
Mono Lake is where Clint Eastwood made “High Plains Drifter.” I always thought there was something strange about that movie.
Dexter
@AdamK: True..as I said above, I read the original paper and for such an extraordinary claim, the data is very thin and inconclusive. Also, arsenate (analogous to phosphate) is very unstable in water. Difficult to see how a bacteria can use arsenate in an aqueous reaction system.
Dexter
@J.W. Hamner: If I am understanding her original publication, then she isolated the bacteria from a layer of soil that is very rich in arsenic. Her hypothesis was that to survive in such condition bacteria has to use As as a metabolite. Thus she fed it arsenate to see if bacteria indeed takes it up and found As in its DNA. Granted the paper is not clear whether they are reporting the result using the wild type bacteria or the one that they deliberately fed As in the lab.
Three-nineteen
Arsenic and cold space?
marcopolo
Just want to say thanks to Nancy Smash for figuring out how to get an up or down vote in the House on only the $250K tax cut. Of course, it just passed over GOP objections. But here’s the kicker, the headline on the first article that pops up announcing this reads:
House OKs extension of tax cuts for some Americans
The article doesn’t indicate who these mythical Americans are who did not get a tax cut. Always good to see the folks at our media giants misrepresenting reality.
DougJ
@Three-nineteen:
Yeah, I thought about that too.
Southern Beale
Growing up in SoCal in the 70s and 80s I remember there was a big “Save Mono Lake” campaign. Can’t remember the details, something about the water which was diverted to Los Angeles starving the lake I think. I know there’s a lot of agriculture up there too. Makes me think that a) conservation efforts 20-30 years ago paved the way for today’s big announcement and, alternately, the environmental pollution from ag runoff may have actually caused this new creepy life-form to develop.
So … anyone?
WyldPirate
No. This is NOT an arsenic based life form.
This was a laboratory experiment more meaningful in the terms of evolution than in the those of “alien life forms”.
Phosphorus is a pretty important element. It is one of the six elements==until now–necessary for life.
One of the primary roles of phosphate is in energy metabolism. The hydrolysis of phosphodiester bonds provides energy required for biochemical reactions to occur. Phosphodiester bonds are found in the building blocks of DNA–the nucleotides that make up the polymeric DNA chains. These nucleotides–individually—have three phosphate groups linked together by phosphodiester bonds. When DNA molecules are synthesized, the hydrolysis of two of the phosphate groups provides the energy to link the nucleotides together in a chain of growing DNA.
What the investigators did is go to a salty-ass lake in Cali that has a shit load of arsenic in it. Arsenic is found as a salt in nature and is chemically very similar to phosphorus. They isolated bacteria from the lake. They grew them in the presence of arsenic and absence of phosphate in the lab. The bacteria substituted the arsenic for the phosphate.
The bacteria made an evolutionary adaptation to an environmental condition. The investigators selected for the mutation that allowed this adaptation to occur.
It’s a big deal, but the news media REALLY cocked up the significance of the story.
WyldPirate
@AdamK:
Yep. It’s primarily the media’s fault.
I did see one of the PIs from NASA this morning in an interview overpimping the story, though.
kdaug
@AdamK: Since it’s the same biosphere, it will be excruciatingly difficult to prove that any life form on earth is a second Genesis to the mouth-breathers.
OTOH, life on another planet would seem to be proof-positive. And our “likely” candidate pool just got a little bigger (looking at you, Venus).
freelancer
@WyldPirate:
You remember your meds today? There isn’t one sentence in your post dedicated to Obama hatred.
J.W. Hamner
@Dexter:
I don’t have access to Science, but I give a rougly 0% chance that she found wild bacteria with arsenic in their DNA. That would be an unbelievably huge deal… what they did is still impressive if confirmed, but not in the same league as finding an arsenic based lifeform on earth.
WyldPirate
@freelancer:
Damn. Thanks for reminding me freelancer.
I blame Obama for allowing the bacteria to mutate and for the poor scientific literacy of the media due to his selection of Arne Duncan as Sec. of Education.
How’s that? ;)
Origuy
The New York Times has an article that gets it (closer to being) right.
It is as the pirate says, a bacteria that has been caused to replace phosphorus with arsenic. It didn’t evolve naturally that way.
DougJ, you missed the obvious title: Arsenic and Old Lakes.
Edit: Science Daily has a more technical article that’s publicly accessible.
WyldPirate
@J.W. Hamner:
I agree, totally.
It’s an impressive example of microbial evolution, but not one that comes close to lending credence for “alien life forms” as screamed on my teevee cable news stations all day.
Elizabelle
Doug, you have outdone yourself on cultural references in titles. Well done.
Origuy ties for the win at 37.
ChrisZ
@Redshirt:
The media is reporting it so that it sounds like a second genesis, but it’s not. It’s a bacterium from a known family of bacteria, from what I understand, that has evolved to be capable of replacing the phosphorous in its proteins/DNA/etc. with arsenic. It’ll use phosphorous still if it’s around, but it doesn’t need it (we think) if it’s got arsenic.
That’s pretty awesome, but not as awesome as the media would have you believe, which is a pretty common theme in all science reporting.
quaint irene
“Dammit, Jim, I’m a doctor not a bricklayer. You can’t expect me to treat these silicone-based life…uh , I mean arsenic-based life forms!!”
freelancer
@Origuy:
Nailed it.
DougJ
@freelancer:
Yup.
jwb
@WyldPirate: Lame. I expect better Obama bashing from you than that.
Caravelle
“These bacteria are made of arsenic” ??? Gosh, science journalism, what would we ever do without you ?
The best analysis I’ve seen on this yet was on Pharyngula. Overhyping aside I think it sounds really interesting.
Nethead Jay
To the couple of people pooh-poohing the significance and details of this, what are your backgrounds? I was watching the press conference streaming 4 hours ago on Nasa TV and there were some pretty serious people commenting on this find.
S. cerevisiae
Good thing those bacteria weren’t in Kansas.
Southern Beale
Brilliant!
Seebach
Who elected these Arsenic life forms? What right do they have to mess with our perceptions of life in the universe?
Southern Beale
I’m sure this is all related to the Rapture, now scheduled for May 21. 2011.
Chicago dyke
i know science is all about testable and demonstrable fact, but does this really surprise anyone at this point? they have found life next to underwater volcanoes and in light-free undersea caves and on space rock from the airless void… i’m not saying “anything is possible,” but i am saying that this planet, let alone the *entire endless universe* together are pretty big, diverse, confusing places that our sad little carbon based minds are only just beginning to understand.
stories like these are why i laugh at those who argue seriously, “we just can’t be sure there’s any other life out there.” no, that’s an arrogance born of religious mythology “the earth is the center of all, and man is the image of gawd.” get over yourself, primitive science, and recognize it’ll be a long, long time before you free yourself of primitive ideology that limits exploration and imagination and you actually *look* at the universe for what it is: so much more than the puny human mind can begin to understand.
ripping Dan Simmons (and I agree): Life likes more Life. and makes it, whenever possible. given we can barely examine the universe outside our little out of the way corner of the Milky Way, it’s pretty damn stupid and arrogant to assume there isn’t any but ours, and in our specific form.
scav
@Chyron HR:
You Brilliant. . . !
jl
The thing is so confusingly and inconsistently reported that it is hard to tell what they did, at least for layman like me.
I think the commenter above who says that they selected a strain that uses only arsenic makes the most sense, but what do I know?
Also, saw in more than one article that Mono Lake is poisonous. Poisonous? What the…? No, it is not poisonous. It is kind of gross unless you are a biology or nature junky. The water is so saline, and so full of brine shrimp, it is kind of like a slippery salty brine shrimp jello (and they are just about that thick in the water). Birds by the bazillions fly in to eat the brine shrimp and alkali flies, which sit in a six inch to one foot wide mass around the shoreline, so small and thick that until you get right on top of them, they look like a ring of black sand around the lake.
Mono Lake has a very high mineral content because it is in a basin just east of the Sierra Nevada range. Mineral stuff in underground streams from surrounding mountains checks into the Mono much faster than it checks out.
I guess some day the story will be reported in a clear way, and we will find out what these arsenic bugs really are.
bkny
remember alien … acid for blood … ;-)
WyldPirate
@Nethead Jay:
PhD Microbiology
I’m not pooh-poohing the science. I’m pooh-poohing the journalism. It’s atrocious.
I can accept hypotheses that life on earth had extraterrestrial origins. They make sense as the universe is older than the earth and bacteria, being far simpler and ancient organisms tolerant of far more varied conditions than eukarya are a likely candidate as “seed organisms” for earth. I can accept the fact that this may have relevance in investigating/demonstrating a tiny sliver of that hypothesis.
But is this paper a validation of a hypothesis of an extraterrestrial life form that landed here on earth? No effing way.
4tehlulz
@Nethead Jay: Why was David Broder on NASA TV?
Brachiator
Perfectamundo!
General Stuck
Now that we’ve located wildythang’s kinfolk, maybe they’ll take him home.
DougJ
@WyldPirate:
You’re impressively gonzo for a lab scientist. The ones I know nod along with the Szooze Hour and rock out to Vivaldi.
But then there’s Amy Bishop, I guess.
Chicago dyke
The best analysis I’ve seen on this yet was on Pharyngula. Overhyping aside I think it sounds really interesting.
well, that’ll teach me not to click a link, heh.
still. what PZ is arguing is mostly what i was trying to say. we don’t fully understand chemistry yet, so this is a “surprise” the the CHONPS thingee he mentions. but it’s not so shocking, except in that we are slow and we should be funding real science research a great deal more. just think of what could be learned if the NASA and NIH budgets were switched with those of the DoD and Fatherland Security. “if the air force had to hold a bake sale and schools got its budget” etc.
S. cerevisiae
@Southern Beale: Oh, great – the world ends on my birthday. Thanks a lot, Jesus.
AdamK
PZ Myers helps clear it up:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/12/its_not_an_arsenic-based_life.php
Southern Beale
@Chicago dyke:
Yup! Nailed it!
And this is why I don’t understand those people who insist science must exist in opposition to religion. The universe is such a vast, mysterious, fascinating place. Anyone whose God is threatened by scientific discovery, not magnified by it, worships a very small God indeed.
scav
@S. cerevisiae: Hey, there are rare instances where empty and rattling gift boxes are welcome but if you don’t want the vacant gift-wrapped holes where the rapturites once were, I’ll take ’em. I’ve still got a birthday coming this year so they can be on an even more accelerated schedule. Everyone’s happy!
Joel
@J.W. Hamner: Not true; they discovered bacteria with some arsenic in their phosphate backbone. They then deprived these bacteria of phosphorous and forced them to compensate (with arsenic), and compensate they did.
Reading the paper, the data isn’t super strong, but it’s one hell of a hypothesis.
Zifnab
@WyldPirate:
I don’t think they were saying that at all. I think they were saying that this life form is a demonstration of the kind of organism – or at least the kind of biological structure – we might find on another planet.
We’ve been hypothesizing life outside the core six building blocks for a while. This would be like biologists theorizing the existence of lungs that could process oxygen in water, and then stumbling upon a fish.
WyldPirate
@DougJ:
I suppose I can take that as a complement, DougJ.
I’m a DFH at heart and I suppose a bit gonzo as well. Being older and more set in my ways when I got into grad school, I had a good deal of horn-locking with some of the more–shall we say sedate and Vivaldi-loving conservative types in my field.
Shorter version–me and my old fogey mentors didn’t get along well. ;)
Mary G
This means we don’t have to care for the earth anymore! Jeebus has sent us bacteria so we can poison everything for free! Gore was wrong just as Rush and Sarah and Beck say!
WyldPirate
@Zifnab:
Sorry, zifnab. I meant that comment based on the media hype, not the paper. I didn’t make that clear.
I agree with what you and they–they being the authors of the paper–say.
The Grand Panjandrum
@WyldPirate: Journalists were hoping for E.T. and all they got was a little tiny bacteria. Sigh, must have been a rough day for them.
Joel
As to anyone suggesting that this discovery is overblown, you have to think like a biochemist. Subsisting without phosphorous, the essential component of nucleic acids and most studied signal transduction cascades, is a pretty big deal.
Mike Goetz
How long until these creatures’ farts are blamed for global warming?
Mike Goetz
@Joel:
Well, obviously!
P-Dog
Scientists find lifeforms made out of arsenic at Mono Lake? So THAT’S where Dick Cheney’s been hiding!
Zifnab
@Southern Beale:
Because religion is bullshit.
“Why is the sky blue?”
Religious Scholar: “Because the Great Father Sky put on the blue jeans of fate as he strode across the heavens to bring us beer and football on Sundays!”
Scientist: “Because shorter wavelengths of light are absorbed and scattered by our atmosphere.”
Religious Scholar: “You’re a gay, beer-hating heretic! I burn you at the stake now!”
And so it goes with everything from birth control to tax policy. “Jesus says” trumps every empirical finding and fact-based decision. Religion makes people do stupid things.
S. cerevisiae
@scav: If nothing else I hear he throws a good party – all I need to provide is water. I wonder if the loaves and fishes trick works for chips and salsa?
Turgid Jacobian
@DougJ: I rather like the title.
Zifnab
@WyldPirate:
The media hype had a bunch of shots of space shuttles and clips from ’80s B-movies spliced into pretty-boy talking heads yakking about exactly how excited they were about all the shit they didn’t know.
This was a discovery made squarely on Terra Firma. The paper was leaked hours before the announcement. The media is full of idiots.
SRW1
That god fellow must really suck as a chemist. Contaminated his creation with arsenic.
WyldPirate
@Joel:
Yup. This, too.
Still no reason the little critter-bug couldn’t have had dual mutations to allow substitution of the arsenic of the phosphate.
It’s also possible that the bug might not have a phosphate-based signal transduction system. I’m not well versed enough on this to know for sure. I would doubt that this is the case and think a substitution is more likely like I said above.
scav
@S. cerevisiae: well, we know it works for fruitcake and zucchini, neither of which rate high on the party-food axis. Still, if the wine’s good, give it a go, who’ll notice?
J.W. Hamner
@Joel:
Like I said, I don’t have access to the paper… but from the reports I’m reading from sources I trust, I am extremely skeptical of your assertion that they found bacteria with any arsenic in their phosphate backbone.
Keith G
@WyldPirate: Thanks for typing this explanation. It helped a lot.
LT
@J.W. Hamner: PZMeyers says this is not as big as announced. But there is arsenate where phosphate should be.
Morbo
@DougJ: Probably listens to the Bodom version.
LT
@Brachiator:
It’s actually a young lake.
J.W. Hamner
@LT:
I believe they were able to coax a bacteria to substitute arsenate for phosphorous, but I’ve not heard a source I consider credible say that the bacteria they got from the lake came that way.
WyldPirate
@Zifnab:
Speaking of this, I saw a bit on the Republican loons vying for the Chairmanship of the House Committee on Science in Newsweek. These loons are going to dismantle the Subcommittee on global warming.
One of the candidates is Joe Barton, Idiot-Tx.
The other is, drumroll, please….
We get us some Bible Spice in as Prez and a Rethug Senate and it’s welcome to the 15th century Murikka!
USA! USA! USA!
Loneoak
How do we know this bacterium isn’t from Kenya? I demand to see the kerning on it’s DNA-backbone.
Mike in NC
Read today that there are plans to build a Creationism theme park next year in Kentucky, where they already are blessed with a Creationism museum and Senator-elect Rand Paul (Nutjob-KY).
Ozymandias, King of Ants
@Southern Beale: The main problem was L.A. taking way too much water from the lake’s tributaries.
Mono Lake is the end point of some of the snow runoff down the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada. When L.A. started taking the water from the streams feeding Mono, there was not enough water flowing into the lake to compensate for the evaporation. Hence the lake started to shrink, and the salts become more concentrated.
There never was much agriculture in Mono County, IIRC. The agriculture east of the Sierra was mainly in the Owens Valley. That was also decimated after L.A. started taking their water.
LT
@J.W. Hamner:
Well, we didn’t come this way either. And from a different direction, nothing else has been known to do it. So it is interesting.
Nethead Jay
@WyldPirate: Thank for the reply, though my comment was more aimed at a couple of comments I read before yours and your background comes through pretty clear there.
Zifnab expressed better why I think this is legitimally interesting. And having watched the press briefing I thought they hit the right level but yeah, I can agree with you that some science reporting can be hit and miss.
WyldPirate
@Mike in NC:
Yeah. I saw a clip on Olberman’s show last night where Chris Hayes was making massive fun of the park and of Kentucky.
the park is supposed to have a replica of Noah’s Ark on it. The State of Kentucky is going to chip in for 1/4 of the 150M proce of the damned thing. They had the Democratic governor on a clip announcing it.
We are so doomed as a country….
Calouste
@WyldPirate:
I think that thing was discussed on here before and that someone pointed out that God promised Noah that he wouldn’t flood the Earth again, but that nowhere it is written that he promised to save mankind from drowning if they turned the tap open themselves.
freelancer
@WyldPirate:
In other venues of Wingnut Martyrdom, The Judge Who Stole Christmas is now available on Amazon.com, and it’s completely free for Kindle Users.
gnomedad
@Southern Beale:
Do they have services scheduled for May 22? I’d go.
gnomedad
@WyldPirate:
Can some zoologist provide them with a list of species they’ll need to put on this thing?
J.W. Hamner
@LT:
I apologize If it’s come across that I think the work is “uninteresting”… that’s simply not the case… probably diametrically opposed to the case. I, like others, just think that some of the commentary out there is misleading and sensational.
AFAICT, NASA scientists did not discover a terrestrial bacteria with arsenate in its phosphate backbone. They were able to cause a bacteria to substitute arsenate for phosphate. This is a distinction with significant difference to me, but that is not to say they didn’t do something awesome. Note that I am not qualified to evaluate what they did on the scientific merits, I’m just trying to keep straight what they are claiming to have done.
Delia
@Calouste:
You can also go at it the other way. Remember James Baldwin’s book The Fire Next Time. It comes from an old African-American couplet
God gave Noah the rainbow sign
No more water, the fire next time.
Which is rather appropriate, when you consider
global warmingclimate change.Also re: LA Department of Water & Power vs Owens Valley: time to watch Chinatown again.
daverave
I’ve spent quite a bit of time around the shores of Mono Lake and can say that there is absolutely no agriculture there. There is a Mono Lake Shrimp Company however. And lots of tufa.
The lake was saved from draw down when a couple of consecutive heavy rainy years (and possibly some fishermen intervention) resulted in trout showing up in streams that LA had been siphoning off for decades. This caused a legal battle between Fish and Wildlife and the City of LA because you’re not supposed to de-water streams that have fish in them. After a long battle, the courts agreed with the fisherpeople and LA was forced to stop sucking the streams dry. The lake has since started re-filling ever so slowly.
Here’s a mess of photos I’ve taken there:
http://photo.net/photodb/folder?folder_id=639742
LT
@J.W. Hamner:
No worries. And isn’t it possible that there could be some areas of the lake, maybe shoreline areas, where the aresenic levels did become extremely high and this did happen naturally? Doesn’t this work suggest the possibility? I guess that doesn’t matter scientifically to just guess at that, but still.
Nethead Jay
@daverave: Awesome photos.
Martin
@Origuy: Mono lake is a young lake, unfortunately, but it’s still a better title. The lake is less than a million years old, dating back to a supervolcano eruption that took place there.
quaint irene
I know, not an open thread. But just wanted to say that I got my Balloon Juice Pet Calender and it is juuuuust lovely!
BR
See – if Los Angeles hadn’t destroyed Mono Lake by sucking all the water out of it and turning it into such a hostile place for ordinary life forms, we would have never discovered this strange new bacterium.
Spraul – 999999999
Save Mono Lake Bumper Stickers – 0
MikeJ
grrr. On BBC America news, Matt Frei was interviewing a democratic congressman. When the congressman said, “I look forward to be back in the majority in the next election.” Frei said, “Yeah, but we know that’s not gonna happen.” Fuck him. I hate that stupid tory shit.
Dee Loralei
Hahahaha Olbermann just used your title in his opening sequence.
Arclite
I have no idea what the cultural references are here. A little help?
daverave
@Nethead Jay:
Thanks for that!
Calouste
@MikeJ:
Frei typically outvillages the villagers and as a consequence the USA coverage on the BBC is terrible. It’s not just the typical Washington Republican bias, the “journalism” is rubbish as well. There have been some shockingly leading story titles on the BBC recently courtesy of Frei. For example today “Gay troop ban repeal ‘premature'” as the title for a post about the ravings of John McCain.
Calouste
@Arclite:
It’s a play later made into a movie.
Dee Loralei
@Arclite: From the old play Arsenic and Old Lace, Frank Capra directed Jimmy Stewart in the movie of the play, it’a a damned amusing story, it even has Teddy Roosevelt.
SRW1
@Dee Loralei:
Almost. The leading male role in the film was Cary Grant, not Jimmy Stewart. Nothing against Stewart, but he isn’t quite the Mortimer Brewster type.