California's Mono Lake harbors strange limestone formations and even stranger bacteria.
It was hailed in 2010 as the most "alien" life-form yet: bacteria that reportedly, and unprecedentedly, had rewritten the recipe for DNA. And the secret ingredient was arsenic.
But now two new studies seem to have administered a final dose of poison to the already controversial finding.
Researchers led by then NASA astrobiologist Felisa Wolfe-Simon had found the organism, dubbed GFAJ-1, in arsenic-rich sediments of California's Mono Lake. They later reported in the journal Science that the bacterium thrived in arsenic-rich, phosphorus-poor lab conditions.
The team concluded that GFAJ-1 must be incorporating arsenic into its DNA in place of phosphorous, which is essential for the DNA of all other known organisms.
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Yosof A. Mohammed
Yosof_90@yahoo.com
http://UNB-facts.blogspot.com
Yosof A. Mohammed
Yosof_90@yahoo.com
http://UNB-facts.blogspot.com
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