Astrobiology - A major discovery!

[Getofmeland]

I don't know how many of you have seen this or heard about this... but last week NASA made a very important announcement in terms of the search for Alien Life...

By the way this isn't a joke!

The discovery of a previously unknown lifeform in California that lives on arsenic is prompting astrobiologists to broaden their hunt for alien life.

The new bacterium - GFAJ-1, part of the class Gammaproteobacteria, which also includes E.coli - was discovered in samples taken from Mono Lake. The lake is naturally high in arsenic because of its location near the volcanic hotspot of Yosemite National Park
A NASA-funded team went looking for exotic life in the Mono Lake after they hypothesised last year that arsenic, extremely poisonous to virtually all life on Earth, could fulfill the biochemical role usually performed by phosphorus.

"We not only hypothesized that biochemical systems analogous to those known today could utilize arsenate in the equivalent biological role as phosphate, but also that such organisms could have evolved on the ancient Earth and might persist in unusual environments today," said Felisa Wolfe-Simon, the lead author of a study appearing in the journal Science Express.

Phosphates are vital to life on Earth, forming the backbone of DNA, for example. Arsenic is so toxic precisely because, being located directly below phosphorus in the periodic table, its chemical behaviour is similar: it is able to disrupt basic processes.

Astrobiologists have worked on an assumption that alien life, if it exists, is probably dependent on phosphorus too, as well as carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, and sulfur. The NASA team today said that view should be reconsidered in light of their find.

"This organism has dual capability. It can grow with either phosphorus or arsenic," said Professor Paul Davies of Arizona State University.

"That makes it very peculiar, though it falls short of being some form of truly 'alien' life belonging to a different tree of life with a separate origin.

"However, GFAJ-1 may be a pointer to even weirder organisms. The holy grail would be a microbe that contained no phosphorus at all."

Professor Ariel Anbar, also of Arizona State, said: "One of the guiding principles in the search for life on other planets, and of our astrobiology program, is that we should 'follow the elements'."

"[This] study teaches us that we ought to think harder about which elements to follow."

As well as greatly increasing the number of planets where life could conceivably exist, the discovery opens fundamental questions about the potential capabilities of undiscovered Earthbound organism
Source The Register

So what does this mean...

It means that previous planets that NASA has looked at and thought couldn't sustain life, could now actually be ideal for life. This means that we no longer have a generic key for life, as there is a potential for other species to live on stuff which would be potentially lethal to us... it also means that we don't actually know what we have on this planet, there could be more things of interest which will help us explain our existence on this planet, and the potential of life to exist beyond our planet. This discovery could be the start of some very big discoveries, all rather interesting.

 

[Feicarsinn]

Dunno know about that now, I still reckon you need a good deal of water to sustain life which would require a planet to fall into the so called "habitable zone." Who knows though? I have an exobiology lecture next week so I'll report back then

 

[Getofmeland]

Yeah I think your right on requiring something's however it may be that life could be sustained without them, the key questions from this would be has this microbe evolved or is this something that has been around for a long time?

 

[Seaton]

Interesting, however isn't arsenic very rare compared to phosphorous?

 

[Teh Mite]

So now we're looking for microscopic, little green... things. In arsenic.

Right-o. Not quite the beautiful, blue-skinned women that Captain Kirks adventures made me imagine what aliens are...