Genome of Controversial Arsenic Bacterium Sequenced

Med-trump writes "One year ago a media controversy was ignited when Felisa Wolfe-Simon and her colleagues held a press conference to announce the discovery of a bacterium that not only survived high levels of arsenic in its environment but also seemed to use that element in its DNA. Last week, the genome of the bacterium, known as GFAJ-1, which gets its name from the acronym for 'Give Felisa a Job.' (No joke!), was posted in Genbank, the public repository of DNA sequences for all who care to take a look. But it doesn't settle the debate over whether arsenic is used in DNA."

Comments

Re:Shouldn't it be fairly simple to determine that

[quarterbuck]

Not enough in this case.
They know that this bacteria lives in an environment of Arsenic and may use it in its cell process. So any Spectrometric study will show Arsenic as contamination. Even if you clean up for that, there might be bits of Arsenic stuck in the DNA, but which do not do anything. I believe what they are trying to do is to see if Arsenic is a "functional" part of DNA. ie would the DNA without Arsenic be the same as arsenic without it.

Re:Shouldn't it be fairly simple to determine that

[networkBoy]

The counterpoint of this is that if *everyone* assumed someone smarter than them was already "on it", then the forward progress of our society would grind to a halt.
Calling someone out on it is counter productive because it discourages asking questions, thus making you simply a troll.
Science is all about asking questions. In fact I learned something because of their question. It is something that had I thought about it I likely could have come up with the answer, but having it elucidated for me was helpful, and that was about not being able to tell (and ways you could possibly tell) whether the arsenic was merely sticking to the DNA strand, or if it was actually in place of the phosphorous.

Remember the greatest discoveries are not usually preceded by "eureka!", but rahter "hmmm... that's funny".
-nB