Arsenic-Thriving Bacteria

[afsred]

So I'm interested to hear about others opinions on NASA's newest discovery, on the Mono Lake bacteria (newscientist.com) . I have read a few articles about people that think it's one of the greatest discoveries of all time, and much more of people that think it's a hoax or rather, an unsupported claim. There are still many test that should be done but they believe they already have enough information to state that they have discovered a bacteria that thrives off of arsenic instead of phosphorus. So what's up with that?

[Moontanman]

So I'm interested to hear about others opinions on NASA's newest discovery, on the Mono Lake bacteria (newscientist.com) . I have read a few articles about people that think it's one of the greatest discoveries of all time, and much more of people that think it's a hoax or rather, an unsupported claim. There are still many test that should be done but they believe they already have enough information to state that they have discovered a bacteria that thrives off of arsenic instead of phosphorus. So what's up with that?

 

 

Many people now think the announcement may have been a bit premature, the evidence that these bacteria are actually replacing phosphorus in their DNA with arsenic is not confirmed. But using arsenic as an energy source is entirely possible and not a few organisms do produce and use arsenic compounds, some fungi comes to mind right off the top of my head. A great many chemicals that are poisonous to us are used as energy sources by many bacteria, this is well known and not a violation of any laws or rules we know of. The things that are poisonous to us are not poisonous to many life forms especially bacteria and in fact they thrive under conditions that would kill any and all complex life forms.