Chemical bond shields extreme microbes from poison
Molecular structure explains how ‘arsenic life’ bacteria rely on phosphate instead
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/345502/title/Chemical_bond_shields_extreme_microbes_from_poison
I mention this research before here, if you are interested in a tiny bit of background. The interesting thing to me (as someone who once intended to make a career out of designing enzymes and proteins) is the minor change in structure that lead to a 4,500 fold increase in preference of phosphate over arsenate. Ask the people who make ultra-pure silicon how difficult it is to make something completely free of contamination before ever considering that the original researchers were capable of totally eliminating any possible source of phosphate (a rather ubiquitous compound that pretty much falls off our body in microscopic bits in an endless rain). As such, with enzymes capable of such incredible differentiation, it now becomes quite feasible to expect the results as initially reported.
Anyway, to me the take-home message is that life, once it has ‘infected’ a planet, is pretty damn difficult to eliminate. If we give Panspermia any credence at all, our solar system, at a minimum, has to be pretty well infected with life in every corner that is capable of sustaining it. Indeed, it becomes rather trivial to expect that our galaxy and universe entire are infected with life, albeit of the microbial variety.
Too bad we can’t seem to muster up the interest to explore for life in our solar system. While I have a lot of complaints about how NASA does business, their budget represents less than 2% of the DoD annual expenses ($17 billion vs at least a trillion dollars) and, other than supporting the massive military industrial complex, we as a society get nothing to show for our DoD expenses. If we supported NASA better we might get something useful out of all those ‘stimulus’ dollars.
