NASA's Newly Discovered Arsenic-Loving Bacteria Are Fascinating, but Not Aliens

Thursday, December 2, 2010 - 13:30 in Biology & Nature

Arsenic-Loving Bacteria This is a transmission electron micrograph of a strain of proteobacteria that has been exposed to arsenic in place of phosphorus. The bacteria grew much larger with the addition of arsenic and the subtraction of phosphorus, and scientists think the internal vacuole-like structures shown in this image may be responsible for the larger size. Courtesy Science/AAASSo everyone chill out. It does raise interesting questions for alien life-hunters, however Biologists have isolated a bacterium that can use a deadly chemical in place of one of life's key building blocks, in a finding NASA says could have major implications for astrobiology. To be clear, this is a bacteria living on Earth, in a very salty and arsenic-heavy lake in eastern California, so it's not a space alien. And it is not "new life" - it's an existing bacteria that scientists deliberately manipulated in a lab to see what would happen. But the...

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