GenesForLife wrote:Gizmodo?!, did someone quote fucking Gizmodo which asserts that a bog standard proteobacterium that can use arsenic instead of phosphorus if the former is present in extremely high concentrations is a "completely different" form of life?

Grrrrrrrrrr.

PS - Science is offline for maintenance but the paper itself will provide a better perspective, I will be back to post the abstract at least later.

Calilasseia wrote:From the actual paper ...

Life is mostly composed of the elements carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur, and phosphorus. Although these six elements make up nucleic acids, proteins, and lipids and thus the bulk of living matter, it is theoretically possible that some other elements in the periodic table could serve the same functions. Here, we describe a bacterium, strain GFAJ-1 of the Halomonadaceae, isolated from Mono Lake, California, which substitutes arsenic for phosphorus to sustain its growth. Our data show evidence for arsenate in macromolecules that normally contain phosphate, most notably nucleic acids and proteins. Exchange of one of the major bioelements may have profound evolutionary and geochemical significance.

Calilasseia wrote:

GenesForLife wrote:Gizmodo?!, did someone quote fucking Gizmodo which asserts that a bog standard proteobacterium that can use arsenic instead of phosphorus if the former is present in extremely high concentrations is a "completely different" form of life?

Grrrrrrrrrr.

PS - Science is offline for maintenance but the paper itself will provide a better perspective, I will be back to post the abstract at least later.

Already posted the abstract about 2 pages ago.

Mind you, I suspect a few people here will be happy if you can get copies of the full paper ... including me ...

Norman Pace a microbiologist at the University of Colorado was scathing. 'Low levels of phosphate in growth media, naive investigators and bad reviewers are the stories here', he said.

Professor Redfield wrote in her blog: ‘Lots of flim-flam, but very little reliable information. The mass spec measurements may be very well done (I lack expertise here), but their value is severely compromised by the poor quality of the inputs.

‘If this data was presented by a PhD student at their committee meeting, I'd send them back to the bench to do more cleanup and controls.

'There's a difference between controls done to genuinely test your hypothesis and those done when you just want to show that your hypothesis is true. The authors have done some of the latter, but not the former.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... z17WLxQLYK