* Astronomy

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GFAJ-1 micro-organism

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GFAJ-1 arsenic microbe

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RE: Mono Lake

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Blobrana · L

At their conference today, NASA scientist Felisa Wolfe Simon will announce that they have found a bacteria whose DNA is completely alien to what we know today. Instead of using phosphorus, the bacteria uses arsenic. All life on Earth is made of six components: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulphur. Every being, from the smallest amoeba to the largest whale, share the same life stream. Our DNA blocks are all the same.
But not this one. This one is completely different. Discovered in the poisonous Mono Lake, California, this bacteria is made of arsenic, something that was thought to be completely impossible. The implications of this discovery are enormous to our understanding of life itself and the possibility of finding beings in other planets that don't have to be like planet Earth.
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Could the Mono Lake arsenic prove there is a shadow biosphere?

Mono Lake has a bizarre, extraterrestrial beauty. Just east of Yosemite National Park in California, the ancient lake covers about 65 square miles. Above its surface rise the twisted shapes of tufa, formed when freshwater springs bubble up through the alkaline waters.
Felisa Wolfe-Simon, a geobiologist, is interested in the lake not for its scenery but because it may be harbouring alien life forms, or "weird life". Mono Lake, a basin with no outlet, has built up over many millennia one of the highest natural concentrations of arsenic on Earth. Dr Wolfe-Simon is investigating whether, in the mud around the lake or in the water, there exist microbes whose biological make-up is so fundamentally different from that of any known life on Earth that it may provide proof of a shadow biosphere, a second genesis for life on this planet.
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Searching for Alien Life, on Earth

In her work at Mono Lake, Wolfe-Simon is particularly interested in micro-organisms that utilise arsenic in novel ways. To you and me, arsenic is a poison. Here's why: our bodies, like all other known life forms on Earth, depend on phosphorus; it's an essential component of both DNA and ATP (adenosine tri-phosphate), the primary energy currency of life. Chemically, arsenic is similar in many ways to phosphorus, so it's easy for arsenic to sneak in to our cells and get incorporated into our biological structures without being detected. Once it's there, however, it doesn't behave like phosphorus. It's like a bull in a china shop; it's too energetic; it wreaks destruction. But for some microbes, it's a different story: arsenic is their friend.

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Latitude: 37°59'57.99"N, Longitude: 119° 1'56.13"W