The big science news this week has been the Science article on a bacterium isolated from Mono Lake that can use arsenate in place of phosphate for many biological functions, including the backbone of its DNA. This is cool, because it stretches our ideas about what is essential for life. It may end up having little practical value (the bacterium still prefers phosphate to arsenate, so it may not be useful for bioremediation work), but it is definitely a strange bug. I wonder how long it took to evolve and if there are other unrelated arsenate-tolerant bacteria around.
The best coverage of the story I’ve seen so far is this xkcd cartoon:
xkcd shows how to do press conferences right http://www.xkcd.com/829/
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The “arsenate in DNA” seems to be bogus, according to analysis by scientists who could follow the wet-lab work better than me:
http://rrresearch.blogspot.com/2010/12/arsenic-associated-bacteria-nasas.html
http://dimer.tamu.edu/simplog/archive.php?blogid=3&pid=6940
Comment by gasstationwithoutpumps — 2010 December 15 @ 17:51 |
[...] seems to be some pretty strong refutation of the claims now. (I blogged about it twice before: when the story first came out and later when the experimental refutations were beginning to come [...]
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