Slashdot Mirror
Conan the Bacterium
An anonymous reader writes "The world's toughest organism, able to withstand thousands of time more radiation than a human, is reported by the Weizmann Institute to have its secret to survival as a tightly packed DNA ring. Their Science article indicates that radiation-induced breakages are held tightly packed rather than floating off into the intracellular fluid. The bacteria,Deinococcus radiodurans, was discovered decades ago in canned food that was sterilized using radiation. Red patches appeared in the cans - colonies of the bacterium - setting off questions as to how it could have survived."
If I were a metasnob, I'd say I'm pretty sure the fancy plural for virus (lit. "poison") would be viri. No cause for "ii".
:)
But viri is probably wrong. The "i" for plural thing turns out to be a product of some grammarian's fundamental misunderstanding of word derivations. Read this re the most famous example, octopus/octopi/octopoda/octopuses. In brief, "pus" means foot and it makes no sense to hack it up to make a plural.
Ever wonder why flammable and inflammable are synonymous? Same thing -- a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
As for bacteria -- that's already plural. Bacterium is singular. (I think.
What's wrong with Conan the Barbarian? It's even alliterative, and alludes to survivorship. But you knew this
... but if it has ancient origins, isn't it odd it didn't evolve away from mechianisms designed for an absent danger, which I assume entail some cost to the organism? The writer does mention the resistance might be good for drought also. Fascinating.
I like that the name "radiodurans" encapsulates literally the bacteria's claim to fame. How about "Radioduran the Radical"?
"The red bacterium can withstand 1.5 million rads-a thousand times more than any other life form on Earth and three thousand that of humans" -- do they mean all life forms complex and bacteria plus other single-celled organisms? If so, I would indeed wonder whether this bacteria came from somewhere else
For a numerical comparison I found some rough numbers for what other living organisms can survive. The unit of radiation used is a Gray, which is the unit used to measure the absorbed dosage of radiation. It does not tell relate the biological effects of that radiation.
These numbers are ones I received from a radiation safety lecture at CERN. I can't vouch for the authenticity of the numbers. But remember, they are obtained from non-controlled experiments (like nuclear accidents) and are an estimates of the amount of dosage needed to kill said organism.
Now according to the Science magazine article, the bacteria, Deinococcus radiodurans can stand up to 15,000 Gy of radiation!