I hope you’re right, otherwise what makes this guess at the announcement any different than all the other guesses?

Let the scientists do their jobs, let them have their press conferences, and worry less about “getting the scoop” on something.

Oh geez, this is a blog, get off your freaking high horse Mike.

Back to the topic at hand, I’m curious about the details of this since arsenic utilizing bacteria were discovered in this lake years ago.

I don’t buy it. Monumental evolutionary changes are beyond rare, they are non-existant. If this is indeed true, I’m with Jake on this being a huge discovery that would forever change genetic studies.

Just imagine what new life could be found on this and other planets when molecular biology tools are tweaked to search for this new type of genetic code.

What was found was huge, the implications not so much, you have to be a very closed minded scientist to think life works the same way everywhere in the universe

mk: bite my ass. Blogs should still have some level of fact checking, otherwise you get all sorts of stories that become “news”, and become “real” as an example look at how many people still believe the Toyota Prius is more harmful to the environment than a Hummer. (please lets not start up this discussion)

THE PRIUS IS MORE HAZARDOUS THEN A HUMMER!!!! BY FAR!!!!!! THe Acid in those batteries is scary toxic.
On a lighter note……I am kinda hungry………….WHAT COLORS YOUR ASS??????

If u read the comments in the original Gizmodo article the whole story becomes cloudier. Some claim the Bacteria don’t occur naturally and were simply trained to substitute the chemically similar As for P sort of as a proof of concept about what alien life could look like. Still interesting but different implications.

I think your blog might have made a mistake. NASA did not say the organism substitured Arsenic for Phosphorous in its genetic material, only suggesting that it is using As as a substitute for P in proteins. That’s a fundamental difference in the story you’re trying to tell.

here is the link to the main article. Feel free to correct me if Im wrong.

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

Jake, once again you are trying to be something you are not, a real journalist. Just do reviews and your little blog and you will be ok.

LMAO…………………

lol wut, you are wrong, or should I say partially correct. The arsenic is being substituted in place of phosphorous in all of the building blocks of the cell. This includes protein as you mentioned but also the backbone of DNA and RNA, as well as the energy carrier ATP.

Mike you are an idiot, you need to read the “blog” again, especially the first sentence where it says “take this with a grain of arsenic. Again, its a freakin blog. Lighten up. Get the stick outta your a-hole.

Journalists aside, as far as science is concerned, this is not in fact radical or game changing. I’m guessing an additional sentence or two to future text books is all.

We’ve known for a long time how arsenic works, by sliding in place of phosphate for cellular processes and bringing things to a screeching halt, resulting in cell death. Arsenic is able to do this because it’s similar to phosphate though different enough to mess things up, such as basic metabolic process where ATP is involved. But don’t take my word for it, look on a periodic table and see how close arsenic and phosphorous are.

We’ve also known for a long time that some bacteria can survive high arsenic environments, such as what’s found in certain California lakes. This paper describes taking those arsenic resistant bacteria and conditioning them in the lab to the point where they are able to survive in media where all the phosphorous is replaced by arsenic.

What the paper indirectly suggests, but does not directly demonstrate, is that the exposed bacteria traded out phosphorous in their DNA backbones with arsenate. This happened with a few amino acids as well.

Not a new life form, nothing radical and nothing extraterrestrial. Just some good ‘ol science.

@mk

Sorry but I watched the conference. They said they believe that As is substituting P in the backbones but there was no direct confirmation. As is slightly larger than P so in order for the hydrogen bonds to maintain their integrity, the angles of the As bonds have to be narrower. P’s bonds are optimized for the helix backbone. Theres also the issue of having all the replication machinery adjusting for the arsenic instead of phosphorus. That’s a lot of DNA to modify.

If true, amazing discover. If it’s just protein and lipid substitution, then ok still pretty good but nowhere as impressive as the genomic level. Go ahead and show me where they confirmed substitution in either RNA or DNA and I’ll eat my words.

lol wut, as far as the article I read, you are right on the money. For everyone else, that finds this hard to follow, in the article I read in the NY times:

Caleb Scharf, an astrobiologist at Columbia University who was not part of the research, said he was amazed. “It’s like if you or I morphed into fully functioning cyborgs after being thrown into a room of electronic scrap with nothing to eat,” he said.

I got really excited when I first read this blog and I thought that alien life was found, not true. All this pretty much somes up to is that possibly we have been looking in the wrong ‘places’ for ET life. Or at least thats what I got from it.

lol wut, I didn’t watch the conference so you might be right. I was going off of the National Geographic website: “A new species of bacteria found in California’s Mono Lake is the first known life-form that uses arsenic to make its DNA and proteins, scientists announced today.”

I just did a search for the actual journal article, and found in the abstract the following claim: “Our data show evidence for arsenate in macromolecules that normally contain phosphate, most notably nucleic acids and proteins.”

I have not read the full article, as I’m too busy studying for my finals (microbiology of all things). If you get a chance to read it first maybe you’ll get further clarification. Its published in Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.1197258).

http://xkcd.com/829/

Sorry, I had to. It was funny.

If anyone is still interested as to why this was at best a minor paper, the results of which will be forgotten in a year’s time, and at worst a bad paper that was published in the journal science, and then over-hyped in the media, read this take-down by a biochemist

http://rrresearch.blogspot.com/2010/12/arsenic-associated-bacteria-nasas.html

The problem with that guys rebuttal is he had miscalculations and typos in it. Not good when you’re going up against NASA and Science Journal.

Um, Rosie doesn’t sound like a guy’s name to me. HA! see, now your entire comment is wrong based on this one trivial error.

The same reasoning, after all, applies to whining about typos and trivial miscalculations that don’t detract from the overall argument. If you notice the one or two miscalculations were corrected in the version you obviously didn’t comprehend.

Am I wrong?

10. Hello, I really included you in my list as certainly one of my preferred blogger simply because you speak your own language in appropriate and somehow simple for us to understand in vernacular.