NASA press conference

[ydoaPs]

Today, at 2pm EST, NASA will hold a press conference about a recently discovered life form with alien DNA.

 

 

From Gizmodo:

At their conference today, NASA scientist Felisa Wolfe Simon will announce that they have 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, share the same life stream. Our DNA blocks are all the same.

 

Does this mean it is possible that our sample size for life has gone from 1 to 2?

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

Does this mean it is possible that our sample size for life has gone from 1 to 2?

 

I suppose that depends on if it appears this life arose independently, or if it's just ordinary life that encountered a freak nuclear accident and ended up with arsenic.

 

I mean, if it's suspected to have a completely different origin than life as we know it, that'd be fascinating. I await the details with interest.

 

---

Press release is out:

 

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

 

Looks like it's a conventional bacterium that was able to grow using arsenic, rather than an entirely new life form that survives on arsenic all the time. Still fascinating, though. The possibilities for life are far greater than we think.

[Sisyphus]

Specifically, it uses arsenic where all other known life uses phosphorous, in its DNA. (Or is it still DNA?) Since it's otherwise the same, it seems very unlikely that it had a separate origin, but then, I don't really know what I'm talking about.

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

Science will have the full article shortly, and they have a press release that goes into great detail:

 

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/330/6009/1302.full

 

Wolfe-Simon isn't arguing that GFAJ-1 prefers, or even naturally uses, arsenic. Mono Lake has a lot of phosphorus as well as arsenic, and the strain grows better when supplied with phosphorus. But to her and others, GFAJ-1 is proof that phosphorus-free life forms can exist and may do so somewhere on Earth. Next, Wolfe-Simon wants to collect samples from places with high arsenic but low phosphorus concentrations in hopes of finding microbes that depend solely on the former.

[Mr Skeptic]

Awesome find.

 

And wikipedia already has an article on them:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GFAJ-1_%28bacterium%29

 

I had a good laugh cause I just finished writing a terribly long paper on alkaline phosphatase.