-s*Image: GJA1, an arsenic-based lifeform discovered by NASA-supported researchers
"NASA-supported researchers have discovered the first known microorganism on Earth able to thrive and reproduce using the toxic chemical arsenic!! The microorganism, which lives in California's Mono Lake, substitutes arsenic for phosphorus in the backbone of its DNA and other cellular components." The microorganism has been labelled GJA1
"The definition of life has just expanded," said Ed Weiler, NASA's associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at the agency's Headquarters in Washington. "As we pursue our efforts to seek signs of life in the solar system, we have to think more broadly, more diversely and consider life as we do not know it."
To read more about this discovery please visit the following links:
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2010/02dec_monolake/
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/12/101202-nasa-announcement-arsenic-life-mono-lake-science-space/
http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-nasa-discovery-element-life.html
It is amazing that life-form could be based upon Arsenic isn't it? As one of the researchers who discovered this quality of arsenic (Felisa Wolfe-Simon of NASA’s Astrobiology Institute ) stated:
" “There’s something fundamental about understanding the flexibility of life. Any life, a microbe, a tree, you grind it up and it’s going to be CHNOPS. But we have a single sample of life. You can’t look for what you don’t know.” (source:http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/12/nasa-finds-arsenic-life-form/ )
