NASA will hold a news conference at 11 a.m. PST on Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe.
Very exciting stuff! I have a gut feeling that this story involves Arsenic.
If it turns out that Felisa Wolfe was right after all she will have to grow a large beard ASAP.... because she will be a f**$#!? new Darwin.
UPDATE:
Now most of the media dust has settled, some of us might have actually read the Science paper. I admire the "progressive" attitude of this team of scientist. I think they have found a cool bug that is unusually resistant to As, but I am both a bit disappointed and alarmed by some of the presented evidence.
One of the things that struck me was how the Felisa and her team aim to show that the genomic DNA contains As in place of P.
Their mass spectrometry analysis seems to reveal only very little As relative to carbon. The study lacks some controls (e.g. other genomic DNA incubated with As medium) to rule out that the small amounts of As result from carry over during DNA extraction and purification.
UPDATE II:
A good but slightly virulent post by Rosie Redfield. Rosie shares (and does a good job explaining) my doubts about the As being covalently bound into nucleotides and describes a few other potential weaknesses of this paper.
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