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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."
Interesting information to be sure...
But how do these micro organisms interact with Human cells ?
Can they survive down here ?
Are the body snatchers on their way ??!!
Surely, we should welcome our new microscopic overlords before they take
over our minds and......**gurgle**
End of Line.
they're found on earth now!
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.
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.
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)
They are less likely to be able to survive those things. Evolution is a set of trade-offs. Being resistant to UV light doesn't buy you heat resistance, or antibiotic resistance. Get good at something, get worse at something else. In fact, I would think that these bacteria are cryophiles and wouldn't grow at body temperature.
Mechanisms for resistance radiation damage are extremely old in life. Half of Earth's history there was insufficient free oxygen to produce the productive ozone layer. Yet bacteria evolved mechanisms to colonize the energy rich top inches of the ocean surface and resist UV damage.
Many of these same chemical pathways were co-opted in aerobic cells. Free oxygen is toxic to many cells and parts of cells. Yet they figured out how to incorporate the toxic mitochondria energy engines. Mitochondria help cells generate an order of magnitude more energy than aerobic cells, setting the stage for later mobile animal life which requires lots of energy.
They are lighter than very small rocks.
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.
When you are unicellular, brownian motion counts as a mass transit system...
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?
I didn't get that idea. If course it's possible to be multi-resistant, but this has to come from not doing something else. The biochemical energy put into repairing DNA or heat-stable polymerases could have been put into reproduction, for example.
The idea I am countering in this thread is the idea that this is some sort of super-bacteria that will devour us all. Finding something new thriving in an extreme environment is a lot less scary than finding something new thriving in a environment close to our own body conditions.
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."
In physical space, not far. A mere 10km.
In parameter space (e.g. factors needed to support life sustainably), pretty far. By comparison, the distinction between the stratosphere and the north pole as an ecological niche is considerably greater than that between the north pole and an equatorial rain forest. Keeping in mind that the distance from the equator and the pole is 10,000km, one might say for poetic purposes (you claim to be an English major after all) that the distance between the surface of the Earth and the stratosphere in their capacities to support life is, at a minimum, over at thousand times greater than their physical separation.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
...I can't help thinking of the headline like this: "Creatures that Can Breathe Underwater Discovered Underwater."
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
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.
Personally, to destroy human kind I would first find some sort of virus that is produced in a plant in fertile Africa. Preferably this virus would grant superhuman strength and ability to a few, but would be highly toxic and deadly to most people. I would then create a giant pharmaceutical corporation to both research the virus, in small cells so no on knew too much, and fund the research of the virus. Any incidental profit is a plus.
In order to test the virus I would have secret facilities around the US as well as facilities in Africa which are staff by poor Africans desperate for jobs. I would then have those facilities have a fake disaster which is actually a releasing of the virus to test it on the populace. After my secret American facility and the city which it lays underneath are destroyed by the US government in order to contain the infection, and my company eventually collapses. I would hire a striking attractive brunette to investigate a parasite that is capable of control humans. This parasite will conveniently pop up in Spain.
I would then conduct research on the parasite, strengthening it, using a facility in Africa that is based over where the original virus came from. I would then blend the virus and parasite to create a super bio-weapon which either consumes the host or allows the host superhuman abilities. The whole plan hinges on the fact that I inject myself with a parasite that allows me to control all the other infected by the engineered parasite. With this, I unleash the bio weapon on earth, destroying most of humanity while leaving the rest of the infect in a state where I can control them.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
The whole plan hinges on "my terribly naive view of biology".
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Given that material is exchanged between the Earth and Mars, I have to wonder if these might not be Martian bacteria.
Great! That's all we need in these tough economic times: more illegal aliens!
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).
The biochemical energy put into repairing DNA or heat-stable polymerases could have been put into reproduction, for example.
So they'll eat us at a slower rate than they would if they didn't have to have multiple resistance :-P
Just kidding, sorta. As I understand it, those plasmids conferring multiple antibiotic resistance are pretty small compared to bacterial chromesomes, are replicated extremely efficiently, and don't really slow the bugs down to where that wouldn't be a problem. When I make ampycillin resistant E.Coli and grow them in amycillin , they don't seem to go much slower than nonresistant bugs on non-selective media. Granted, I'm not timing them or looking very closely, but I really can't tell a difference. And how much would the extra time for reproduction really help you if it's growing in you? Even if it doubles it's reproduction time, we're still talking a matter of minutes or hours, and it would still grow exponentially. It's still going to reproduce faster than any cancerous cells, right?
It seems to me that the bigger hurdle for a pathogen is avoiding or defeating our immune systems, that seems like a much more complex challenge than being resistant to an antibiotic, and clearly there is no tradeoff there.
UV resistance of course isn't much of an issue, as you typically wouldn't be using UV to treat a bacterial infection, but I don't think it's at all safe to assume that being resistant to one thing makes a bug safer in other ways.