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UV-Resistant Micro-Organisms Discovered In the Stratosphere
junglee_iitk writes "Three new species of bacteria, which are not found on earth and highly resistant to ultraviolet radiation, have been discovered in the upper stratosphere by some Indian scientists. These bacteria, which do not match any species on earth, were found in samples collected through a balloon sent up to the stratosphere in April 2005. The payload consisted of a cryosampler containing 16 evacuated and sterilised stainless steel probes. Throughout the flight, the probes remained immersed in the liquid neon to create a 'cryopump effect.' These cylinders after collecting air samples from different heights ranging from 20 to 41 km were parachuted down and safely retrieved, it said." Here's the Indian Space Research Organisation's press release on the discovery. Adds an anonymous reader: "This paper in International Journal of Astrobiology [PDF] speculates how microorganisms reach the stratosphere."
Who knows what we'll find in the upper atmosphere of Venus. Maybe we've been looking for life in the wrong places all alon.
I trust you all know about the TB bacteria, which in recent years has regained prominence, due mainly to the fact that (multi) resistive strains are being encountered in patients worldwide with ever increasing incidence. But, we also know that TB is not so easy to transmit and that it's killed very easily by the rays of the sun. It's susceptible to UV and this keeps a lid on TB epidemics.
Now, imagine if somehow TB could be made UV resistant.
Wet dreams of some mad dictator in his efforts to conquer the world? Or destroy humankind altogether? This could be it.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I checked the linked paper, from 2005, and while is presents some interesting arguments, it is not a thorough discussion of the subject.
Too many possibilities of Earth origin are rejected with the phrase "it seems unlikely", and there's no mention of the most obvious method by which the micro-organisms get there: random motion (OK, particle velocities in the atmosphere will not be truly random, but you'd still expect a few outliers with very high velocities.)
So, their conclusions may not necessarily be wrong, but they need to do a few more experiments before making a convincing argument that they're right.
(P.S. yes I am a professional Astrophysicist)
This is interesting. but not wholly surprising. Bacteria exist in basically every part of the world, including areas even a "reasonable" person might find incredible. NASA clean rooms have turned up a lot of exotic, unique bacteria which defy common sense (like bacteria who live solely on aluminum IIRC). So, UV resistant bacteria in the stratosphere is nifty in that they confirmed it exists, but isn't revolutionary.
Douglas Whitaker
I always find it interesting how local events, lore, and legends end up affecting future thoughts and research. I have no doubt that events like the Red Rain in Kerala lead researchers to come up with these ideas and projects.
I'm sure if I had more coffee this morning, I would list a few other examples I have come across in the past.
"What's the use of a good quotation if you can't change it?" - Doctor Who
What the hell do they eat in the stratosphere? They must also be able to survive with very little water. Maybe they spend time in lower levels of the atmosphere.
Your point is valid, in that these bugs are probably woefully unsuited to ordinary terrestrial life(even before they make it to our defenses, they'll have to deal with competition from organisms that have evolved to do things other than resist UV all the time).
In some cases, though, resistances do come in packages; because the resistance is obtained by some underlying mechanism that has multiple uses. Things like DNA repair/redundancy mechanisms, or mechanisms for pumping undesirable compounds out of the cell, would qualify.
Deinococcus radiodurans, for instance, has extraordinary resistance to ionizing radiation(as its name suggests); but it is hypothesized that that resistance is an incidental effect of the extreme resistance to dessication that the organism also possesses.
Ok, so here's my plot: They, like, scoop immortal UV resistant clone bacteria from the upper reaches of the atmosphere and, get this, it EATS radiation and so if you ...
It has?? When?? Oh.
Ok, so how bout this: So, like, this plane crashes on an island and the survivors run into a giant killer mutant iguana from the Badassic era but Ron Perlman shows up with this HUGE rail gun ...
Without any kind of background in the subject (disclaimer disclaimer) I've begun to wonder if the substrate for the emergence of life on Earth may have been carbon nanotubes or graphene on clays, with various oxidising agents as the energy source. This could apply also to remote moons.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
These bacteria were retrieved at "different heights ranging from 20 km to 41 k".
These altitudes bracket the surface pressures on Mars, and the conditions at 41 km are quite comparable to those
on the Martian surface (full UV flux, lower atmospheric pressure).
Given that material is exchanged between the Earth and Mars, I have to wonder if these might not be Martian bacteria.
There is another article from last year regarding the meteorites found in Antarctica, which were found to be loaded with amino acids. I also remember reading something about actual microbes/bacteria that were found to have entered the atmosphere from space quite recently, but I can't remember the link. It could have been this current story, considering the paper dates from 4 years ago.
I see no reason that this could not be valid. Comets and asteroids have near misses with planets quite regularly and the occasional glancing blow will surely take some of whatever is on the planet out into space. As the paper states, these micro-organisms are viable but don't respond to culturing. Which could mean they were alive but are dormant and don't respond to conditions here on earth.
Being previously undiscovered doesn't really prove anything as the Amazon is full of insects and other life that have yet to be "discovered" by man, but this is not definitively disproving panspermia. IMHO, this is one of the prime reasons for humans to visit Mars, as it is very difficult to get a robot to be able to spot these kinds of organisms, especially if they are not currently alive. The conditions on Mars are not favourable for large organisms, but if there is water ice, then you have the capability of getting H2 and O2 at the least. And as Mars has no magnetic field (to speak of), there would be large amounts of mutating cosmic rays hitting the surface continually for billions of years. It would be odd if nothing came of it.
I've been reading some of Asimovs later scientific essays, and he describes how you can predict with some certainty which planets are likely to have a magnetosphere. Basically, you need a reasonably rapid rotation, and a molten or high temperature metallic core which "sloshes" about as the planet spins. This core acting against the outer layers of the planet causes the magnetic field. The only real reason our planet is special, regarding life, is that we have an exceptionally large moon, too large in fact as conventional wisdom goes, to have been formed by capturing passing debris. We are almost a binary planet system, and that is pretty rare. So the possibility of life forming actually in space (rather than on another planetary body) has to be considered.
If we send men to Mars and they find similar micro-organisms there, then it is possible they came from space rather than evolved natively. Especially if there are no other traces of activity that can be construed as being the result of living organisms.
Interesting stuff, which can never be verified while we sit here exploring from a distance.
The new dempgraphic will eat this up! Just think of it... we can tie in balloons, fashionable climate change zealotry, a discussion about sun screen... and because it was Indian scientists, they can really stretch the pop-culture connections, and have a sort of Slum Dog Xenobiologist thing where the scrappy kid from the wrong part of town discovers that we can stop the bacteria from creating dancing Bollywood zombies by sprinkling them with Splenda. I'm calling my agent - the screenplay just writes itself.
Speaking of which, has there been a Bollywood zombie movie yet? Sort of a Michael Jackson's Thriller thing, but with more colorfully dressed zombies?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
The stratosphere is about 8-15 km above sea level, depending on latitude. To put this in perspective, the top of Mt. Everest is two-ish km shy of the stratosphere.
Seriously .. resistancy to UV means they are tough buggers to kill? Clorox is not gonna phase these tiny invaders...
This is completely wrong. They're resistant to UV because the upper atmosphere is constantly bombarded by UV rays. Clorox and UV rays' methods of cell destruction are completely different. In fact, they are probably less resistant to bleach/antibiotics etc than bacteria down here because they've never been exposed to it.
Not necessarily. Clorox is a highly reactive oxidizer. Much like ozone. Which is produced by ultraviolet light, thus producting the ozone layer, which is in the stratosphere. Where the microorganisms under discussion are found.
So if they live in the stratosphere, they're likely to be somewhat resistant to ozone as well, which means they'd likely be resistant to clorox.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Random motion might be a method if it wasn't for the tropopause - which they mention. What they do not mention is the other more likely cause - the amount of stuff humans throw up into the atmosphere, as all of their data comes from after the start of the Space Age.
Space craft, supersonic aircraft and weather balloons all regularly go into the stratosphere and could carry particles. 10 years of bacterial evolution would be enough to develop some UV resistance (if we work from the bacteria being deposited there in the late 60's and then sampled in 1978).
"If a bacteria that is resistant to heat or antibiotics was in a high UV environment, there is nothing that requires, or even suggests, that it would lose its previous resistance as part of gaining a UV resistance. I'm not even sure where you'd get that idea?"
Well, I'd get that idea from the E. coli Long-term Experimental Evolution Project. When you stop selecting for a particular ability, genetic drift deteriorates that ability. As an example, in the E. coli Long-term Experimental Evolution Project, only glucose is provided as a food source for the bacteria*. Testing has shown that later generations are much better at processing glucose, but they slowly lose their efficiency in processing other materials.
*Techniccally citrate is also present, but E. coli don't process citrate. The recent evolution of such an ability in one culture is truly astounding.
Most extremophiles are so adapted to their environment that they can survive but have a hard time reproducing in more conventional environments.
I think people tend to think simple organism (like single cell bacteria) can evolve to grow into organisms that are immune to everything, but in reality they have limited DNA to work with until they evolve into a more complex organism which tend to not be able to adapt as easy.
Case in point, bacteria that live in the gas vents in pitch black almost boiling temperatures will not live if you brought it the surface area where it is cooler and has more sunlight.
If by the small chance you brought the bacteria to the surface waters (and by small, lets say 100 millions years using a sampling of more than trillions of trillions of bacteria) and found some that didn't die because of random mutations allowed them to live there, you still can't take that mutated bacteria and take it back to the bottom of the ocean and expect it to survive in such a location without going through the same process of 100 millions of years of evolution.
Sure, a bacteria that doesn't die in UV can live fine up there, but can it live in an environment of different temperatures, chemical compositions, other bacteria, and almost of infinite things that might just make it die.
And if by the off chance it does evolve to where it survives in our environment, who is to say that it won't loose its mutation of the UV resistance. There aren't any UV rays down here, and that is just wasted DNA and natural selection won't kill off any bacteria that mutated and lost its resistance so they'll continue to multiply.
As an aside, this is one of the key reasons I argue that hand sanitizers don't actually make "super bugs". Your insides aren't made of soap and alcohol and you don't drink purell when you are sick. So if a bacteria got immune to a hand sanitizer, then it really doesn't make a difference if it is inside of you.
What you should be concerned about is the over use of anti-biotics since that is what you take when you are already infected in which would be a common environment that doesn't have a major evolutionary hurdle to jump.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
You know, thinking about it, since photosynthesis relies on CO2 as a key component to synthesize carbohydrates, possibly they've found a counter for global warming! I'm sure none of the existing AGW climate models include a atmospheric, CO2-fixing bacteria factor.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
Yes, genetic drift can remove previous beneficial mutations but not always.
Some resistance mechanisms carry little to no negative effect. Take, for example chloramphenicol resistance in E. coli. One of the common resistance mechanisms is a mutation in one of the ribosome subunits. (I forget which one and am too lazy to look it up right now) It has a small deleterious effect but prevents chloramphenicol from covalently attaching to and inactivating the ribosome. It has been observed that many bacteria under selection them develop mutations in other areas of the ribosome that help to offset the deleterious effects of the resistance mutation.
Once that happens, the resistance mutation is not only neutral outside of selection but are often locked in as well. The compensatory mutations that helped the ribosome relieve the distortion from the resistance mutation now prevent it from being lost. A single mutation that eliminates the resistance mutation now reintroduces distortion in the ribosome and is negatively selected.
So it's a bit of a stretch to say that beneficial mutations are exclusionary to each other. That is often the case but you should always be careful about making generalizations in biology. Often, you can get beneficial mutations that are locked in that don't revert when the selective pressure is off. This especially applies to mutations that have had significant amounts of time to be refined by subsequent evolution.