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Or rumour has it... also in this case "alien" doesn't mean "Extraterrestrial"... it just means that they have discovered a bacteria that uses arsenic in it's DNA instead of Phosphorus like every other known life form... which, while revolutionizing our understanding of biology and increasing the likelihood of the existence of extraterrestrial life significantly... isn't ALL that exciting to anyone who isn't a nerd.

IAM ANNOUCING MAH ALIEN!

yes its exciting but if it is just a replacement of phosphorus with arsenic in the DNA it is not very alien. Something can be using normal DNA and still be more alien than this if it codes for entirely different proteins.

dizekat wrote:yes its exciting but if it is just a replacement of phosphorus with arsenic in the DNA it is not very alien. Something can be using normal DNA and still be more alien than this if it codes for entirely different proteins.

Mmmm, it is interesting because in theory it's not a lifeform that could be brought about through evolution of a phosphate based lifeform though (probably). So it seems to indicate that it is likely that this stem of lifeforms was spontaneously initiated totally separate from the initiation of any other life form on earth.

Yep, this seems to confirm abiogenesis is not a once in a universe freak chance/divine intervention, but rather quite commonplace. We will probably encounter real aliens too. Alien microbes anyway...

What? Arsenic is very close to phosphorus; it's a relatively normal bacteria, evolved the normal way to use an abundant resource with the same behavior as a scarce one. I don't see how this is more revolutionary than other crazy bacteria methods. There is no evidence here of a parallel formation of life. It's important, yes, but it's being overreported.

lurker wrote:What? Arsenic is very close to phosphorus; it's a relatively normal bacteria, evolved the normal way to use an abundant resource with the same behavior as a scarce one. I don't see how this is more revolutionary than other crazy bacteria methods. There is no evidence here of a parallel formation of life. It's important, yes, but it's being overreported.

Oh, it's just the first time ANYTHING has ever used anything else in DNA.

lurker wrote:What? Arsenic is very close to phosphorus; it's a relatively normal bacteria, evolved the normal way to use an abundant resource with the same behavior as a scarce one. I don't see how this is more revolutionary than other crazy bacteria methods. There is no evidence here of a parallel formation of life. It's important, yes, but it's being overreported.

agreed totally.

There's how something like this can evolve: progressive tolerance to replacement of phosphorus by arsenic. Essentially, tolerance to a form of poisoning. Sure, arsenic is not exactly like phosphorus, but it is close enough that replacement of just a small fraction won't kill some bacteria.
There's why something like this is not independently formed life: the coding for amino acids is not different.

To quote Feynman:
I would like to add something that's not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the laymen when you're talking as a scientist. . . . I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you're maybe wrong, [an integrity] that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.

Too bad he is not alive any more. Nowadays reputable scientific institution's public relations departments are taking upon themselves the function of tabloid magazines, always trying to spin everything in the most exciting way possible to the layman. And sure enough, they succeed spectacularly, judging by the talk about abiogenesis here. I find it disgusting when scientific institutions act the way how a game development company could for new game announcement, complete with overstating how different their new game is, and with 'leaks' of 'rumours'. Before you know it, they're going to be announcing that they are going to find alien life by 2012 and then run pre-sale campaign for tickets.

edit: sorry to NASA looks like they are not all that much to blame... i do feel ambivalent about deceiving the people whom do not read entire article. it is not so unethical.

also do you guys even read articles?

The newly discovered microbe, strain GFAJ-1, is a member of a common group of bacteria, the Gammaproteobacteria. In the laboratory, the researchers successfully grew microbes from the lake on a diet that was very lean on phosphorus, but included generous helpings of arsenic. When researchers removed the phosphorus and replaced it with arsenic the microbes continued to grow. Subsequent analyses indicated that the arsenic was being used to produce the building blocks of new GFAJ-1 cells.

The key issue the researchers investigated was when the microbe was grown on arsenic did the arsenic actually became incorporated into the organisms' vital biochemical machinery, such as DNA, proteins and the cell membranes. A variety of sophisticated laboratory techniques was used to determine where the arsenic was incorporated.

Translation: a common terrestial bacteria had evolved to be able to survive replacement of most of phosphorus with arsenic (which is very similar to phosphorus, but has different radius and so things usually fail if you replace phosphorus by arsenic, which is the reason why arsenic is poisonous). This bacteria can use either phosphorus or arsenic. Not only has it evolved from phosphorus using lifeform, it uses phosphous if it has any. Not only is it not alien, it is closely related to phosphorus-only bacteria.

There's what it is:
Awesome example of how life can adapt to really harsh conditions, and of how far did it go.
There's what it is not:
Example of abiogenesis
There's what it changes about our view of life on other planets: life's tougher than we thought.

What it does prove is not that life could have easily been generated in other planets, but that if it did exist, it could be of a completely different chemical makeup as the life we know.

Heh, yeah I guess I jumped to conclusions without considering all the angles. Although, I don't see why a form of life couldn't have evolved in an isolated, toxic environment (no competition) on its own apart from the dominant line. But yeah, it is more likely some bacteria just adapted to the environment.

Teutooni wrote:Heh, yeah I guess I jumped to conclusions without considering all the angles. Although, I don't see why a form of life couldn't have evolved in an isolated, toxic environment (no competition) on its own apart from the dominant line. But yeah, it is more likely some bacteria just adapted to the environment.

well actually its at same time far more and less amazing in this case...
it's bacteria that can live with either phosphorus or arsenic, and it is related to other similar bacteria that can use phosphorus only. And it did not take all that long to evolve.

A lifeform compatible with both phosphorus and arsenic is more amazing than purely arsenic lifeform, but at same time it leaves no room for speculation about more amazing possibilities, and less room for forgetting that arsenic is chemically very similar to phosphorus (the cell right under phosphorus on periodic table, same valency, but slightly different size and much different weight), plus it is clear enough how it came to be through gradual tolerance to substitution of phosphorus by arsenic.

Question is can such life evolve into more complex creatures and not just microscopic microbes.

Gota wrote:Question is can such life evolve into more complex creatures and not just microscopic microbes.

Yeah, once they get a bacteria to evolve into, I don't know a plankton or a virus or pretty much anything other then a different variant of the same kind of bacteria we can get all those creationists and intelligent design proponents to shut up... oh wait, neither of those things will ever happen.

[Tooltip: According to a new paper published in the journal Science, reporters are unable to thrive in an arsenic-rich environment.]

You know a virus is much simpler than a bacteria? Virus are so small and simplistic they might not even be worthy of being called living organisms, depending on your definition of life. Plus, most virus don't even have DNA, so uh, having phosphorus replaced by arsenic in their DNA is not even relevant to them.

Microscopic microbes, as you call them, can be very complex creatures, with a long lineage of evolution. Getting from mineral to microbes is much harder than getting from microbes to mammals.

dizekat wrote:also do you guys even read articles?

The article wasn't posted yet when I posted. I don't find it at all surprising to be wrong though, I was simply restating what I had read on one of the other news sites reporting on the impending announcement.

zwzsg wrote:You know a virus is much simpler than a bacteria?

I'm sure somewhere in some part of my brain I knew that... I should have said something along the lines of "..cause one type of Bacteria to 'evolve' into a different kind of 'single-celled microorganism' or even a different kind of bacteria..." I guess.

basically, my point is that all anyone has ever been able to due is "turn off" or "turn on" latent traits encoded in DNA and no evidence has been demonstrated that "random mutation" could account for the development of new "genetic information" being created and successfully propagated other then "God doesn't exist, it had to have happened randomly" which is just as unscientific as the "Well God must have done it" hypothesis...

It's also entirely possible I was subconsciously rage/flame-baiting.

There's plenty of evidence that gamma ray, chemical, cell duplication gone wrong, and plenty other things cause DNA to be modified. You can watch under a microscope the DMA getting damaged, the pairs of base getting deleted, inserted or changed to other pairs, if that is your question. DNA is genetic information, so any change to DNA is a creation of new genetic information. Well, unless you discount unused section of the DNA, in which case only some of them do. There is also plenty of evidence that that whatever info is in a DNA is "succesfully propagated" whenever cell duplicate. There's even evidence than babies are made by fusing the DNA from daddy's little tadpod with mommy's little egg!

On the higher level, yeah, there's also evidence of evolution as in genetic trait appearing and becoming dominant in population when they're advantageous. Like put aids into 100 millions people, give medicine to some millions but not other, and watch as the strain of aids in treated people get resistance to treatment encoded in its RNA.

Evidence that God doesn't exist is a taboo subject, so you won't find as many scientific paper on that.

But no evidence will ever convince a faithful fundamentalist.