Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Microbes Alive After Being Frozen for 32,000 Years

Posted by samzenpus on from the stasis dept.

An anonymous reader writes "LiveScience is reporting on a new type of bacteria that after being frozen 32,000 years in the Arctic was ready to swim, eat and multiply instantly upon being thawed. Researchers are excited because they're the sort of microbes that might thrive in the ice sea announced on Mars yesterday. The instant revival abilities mean a future mission, if it found anything on Mars, could conceivably culture it and bring it back alive. Maybe NASA could market them as Martian Sea Monkeys."

3 of 527 comments (clear)

  1. I, for one,... by bcrowell · · Score: 5, Interesting
    welcome our new Martian bacterial overlords!

    But seriously, discovering unicellular life on Mars would be the greatest scientific discovery of the last 200 years, and if it's there, we could do it very cheaply with an uncrewed sample return mission, using present-day technology. It's too bad that the average taxpayer thinks germs from another planet just don't sound very interesting.

    --
    Find free books.
  2. tardigrada by tardigrades · · Score: 5, Interesting

    tardigrades are way cooler http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrada

    --
    really bored? My blog
  3. Re:I spit on your 32K years. Try 25M! by FleaPlus · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Ooh, never mind, found it. Yay for google scholar:

    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd= Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=7538699&dopt=Citation

    Revival and identification of bacterial spores in 25- to 40-million-year-old Dominican amber.

    Cano RJ, Borucki MK.

    A bacterial spore was revived, cultured, and identified from the abdominal contents of extinct bees preserved for 25 to 40 million years in buried Dominican amber. Rigorous surface decontamination of the amber and aseptic procedures were used during the recovery of the bacterium. Several lines of evidence indicated that the isolated bacterium was of ancient origin and not an extant contaminant. The characteristic enzymatic, biochemical, and 16S ribosomal DNA profiles indicated that the ancient bacterium is most closely related to extant Bacillus sphaericus.