Slashdot Mirror
Nanobacteria Discovered?
mfh writes "The BBC is reporting that a new form of life has been discovered, nanobacteria, which was previously only theorized by Finnish researchers Kajander and Ciftcioglu. A team lead by Dr John Lieske of the Mayo Clinic claims they have found irrefutable evidence of the existence of nanobacteria, which is likely responsible for a plethora of illnesses."
Sounds like a new generation of biological weapons are waiting to be developed which would be far more difficult to detect...
What size particules can standard biofilter masks remove? The kind that the military use? Medical?
Scepticism indeed seems warranted here. For one, it is telling that this "breakthrough" has appeared in a low-impact journal. What's even more important is that behaviour as shown by the "nanobacteria" can also be interpreted as being the consequence of conformational changes of proteins in solution induced by the particles. Mutated prions are also capable of doing so (they change the prion normal structure into a beta-sheet), thereby causing disease. Self-assembly of macromolecules also comes to mind as a potential explanation. It is therefore way too early to describe the structures found as "living". Do viruses live? Do prions "live"? They do not, but bacteria certainly do. Craig Venter has rather convincingly shown that most currently known living organisms require a minimum set of genes for metabolism and so on, ie a minimum amount of DNA, organelles, proteins and so on. If the nanobacteria are too small to contain all of that, which they do, I very much doubt they deserve the name bacterium. Their disease-causing potential is a different matter altogether, see the prion diseases. If these structures can accelerate atherosclerosis in model animals I would certainly be intrigued to say the very least.
----- One learns to itch where one can scratch.
One of the major arguments against the life harboring theory for the meteorite found in Antarctica in 1984 by Roberta Score was that the signs of life it contained were an order of magnatude smaller than anything known to man. Perhaps these signs of nanobacteria merit reopening the mars rock investigation?
Nanobacteria - Is Cardiovascular Disease an Infection??
1998 Nanobacteria paper for biology geeks and Doctors
bottom line, this stuff has been debated since 1985. Now someone claims to discover a new form of life? That's like not naming the new world Columbus discovered Columbia (with apologies to the American Indians, who were there all along) Plenty of prior art.
Note also the results from the usual Google Search on NanoBacteria
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I read the PNAS article that was written by one of the critics. His claims that it's due to the aggregation of some other mineral particle, such as apatite, and has evidence to suggest that this is possible. He also does DNA sequence comparisons to demonstrate that there is a very strong similarity between the putative nanobacterial sequence and a common bacterial sequence for a certain very old (and therefore very well conserved over time) gene, indicating that it may be due to contamination.
While this evidence isn't very compelling in itself, it does cast a lot of doubt in my mind on how these nanobacteria could work. The DNA staining is very inconclusive (no distinct chromosomes), and even the culture conditions for the nanobacteria (including an experiment where they further dilute the nanobacteria culture and get no growth at all) make things very tenuous.
I'd personally like to see a genetic sequence for these things. I'd also love to hear an answer as to how they can replicate with such a small amount of DNA. I certaintly don't want to say that it's impossible for these things to exist, but the data so far is definitely inconclusive. Multiplication in serum does not equal life.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
It's obvious that this is one of your buttons. I am not that fond of the impact factor system. On the contrary. However, at this point in time it is one of the few more or less reliable ways of judging the importance (in terms of readership etc) of a particular publication. And while bullshit has OCCASIONALLY appeared in Science, Cell or Nature, "plenty" is not the word I would use. Generally, standards are high. And if a mid-range journal asks for seven revisions that tells me too that there is politics going on. That is, some editor really wanted it published while others did not like it at all. If a paper is rejected by reviewers twice in a row that is usually grounds for definitive rejection. And to get back to the original point - this still doesn't mean that the existence of nanobacteria has been proved or that the methods used for the proof were adequate.
----- One learns to itch where one can scratch.
Well, pass me some crow. After checking some of the replies, an anonymous coward wrote
I think you will find that the BBC got the spelling from mississippi state univeristy.
Wondering where he found that information, I clicked on the "Related Links" link from the BBC article, did a little more clicking, and found the following excepts from this article
After many puzzling months, RLF finally went to the Biology library and found that, yes, dwarfed bacterial cells were known, variously called spores, resting stages, or ultramicrobacteria. Along the way, a friend stopped by to examine the photos and said that these looked like what had been called "nannobacteria" (term coined by R. Y. Morita in 1988).. So Folk adopted that term, analogous to "nannoplankton" or "nannofossils" common terms in geology dating back to the 1800's.
Guess it's not the BBC's fault after all, though I still prefer "nanobacteria".
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
Bigger fleas have smaller fleas
Upon their backs to bite'em
And smaller fleas have lesser fleas
And so ad infinitem.
And the bigger fleas, in turn
Have greater fleas to go on
And these in turn have greater still
And greater still, and so on.