Lake Vostok Found Teeming With Life

jpyeck writes "Lake Vostok, Antarctica's biggest and deepest subsurface lake, might contain thousands of different kinds of tiny organisms — and perhaps bigger fish as well, researchers report. The lake, buried under more than 2 miles (3.7 kilometers) of Antarctic ice, has been seen as an earthly analog for ice-covered seas on such worlds as Europa and Enceladus. It's thought to have been cut off from the outside world for as long as 15 million years. But the latest results, reported in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, suggest that the lake isn't as sterile or otherworldly as some scientists might have thought. More than 3,500 different DNA sequences were identified in samples extracted from layers of ice that have built up just above the surface of the lake."

Comments

Are any of them potentially dangerous?

[Anonymous Coward]

They should get one of the clipboard guys to chug a bottle and see if he mutates.

Re:Are any of them potentially dangerous?

[TWiTfan]

Screw dangerous, I'm wondering how those fish *taste*.

Don't dig up the spaceship

[Anonymous Coward]

That ends badly

After all the fuss

[Provocateur]

...it turns out to be life as we know it

Drop a few kilos of explosives down the chute

[Adult film producer]

See if anything floats to the surface? Probably the easiest way to confirm.

It's not contamination

[dfm3]

If you read TFA, you'll see that 1) they did sequence DNA, 2) they found many, many species which are not the usual ones associated with contamination due to methodology, and 3) they found organisms that can theoretically survive in the extreme and varied environments believed to be present in the lake (thermophiles near suspected geothermal areas, halophiles in brackish/salty water, etc). As a microbiologist, I find it fascinating that the authors not only provide a list of species, but go so far as to paint a complete picture of how each could possibly exist in a completely functioning ecosystem. For example, they found organisms responsible for carbon and nitrogen fixation, and hypothesize that these same species will also be found throughout the lake water in their various niches.

Re:It's not contamination

[radtea]

I've read TFA, and thanks for adding some clarity, but I still have to wonder when they'll sequence the DNA.

Apparently you neither read the TFA nor the reply to your original false assertion that they didn't sequence the DNA.

Nor does your claim "if it's just an already known species then it's just contamination" make any sense.

I was on a remote island recently. I picked up an odd feather on the beach. I brought it back home and used it to identify the bird it came from. It was a known species.

There is absolutely no basis in that observation to support the claim that my backpack had somehow become contaminated by feathers from that species, and DNA is no different from feathers in this regard, when subject to ordinary standards of careful handling for such samples, which were obviously applied in this case (that is: the people doing the research are not and should not be presumed to be complete idiots.)

So you're completely wrong about all that, but have a nice day anyway!

Re:"More than"

[Samantha Wright]

The exact number is 3,507. I hope you're now able to sleep well at night.

...and if you're curious, that number is actually extremely low by the standards for this type of experiment; they didn't analyse anywhere near enough data. Metagenomics is supposed to take up gigabytes of disk space; the amount of usable data they got was around 37 MB.