We have been learning a great
deal about biology’s survival abilities and now we discover that bacteria can
survive 34,000 years in a salt bubble.
It is an idea that would have been rejected out of hand had not the
evidence been there.
Last year we had the impossible
Tyrannosaurus Rex DNA discovery in fossilized bone however it may be
degraded. Lately we learn that we are
four years out to have a living mammoth wandering about. Of course, that may turn out to be four years
of work chopped up into separate parts like every busy lawyer.
The idea of life forms traveling
in space great distances continues to become more believable. Protection form radiation is too easy to
effect in a comet and micro environs such as this can do it.
34,000-Year-Old Organisms Found Buried Alive!
Jan 6, 2011 5:53 PM ET
By Andrea Mustain,
OurAmazingPlanet Staff Writer
They're aliiiiiiiive! But difficult to spot. The bacteria are the tiny,
pin-prick-looking objects, dwarfed by the larger, spherical algal cells. The
colored spots come from pigments the algae produce, carotenoids, still vibrant
30,000 years on. Credit: Brian Schubert.
It's a tale that has all the trappings of a cult 1960s sci-fi movie:
Scientists bring back ancient salt crystals, dug up from deep below Death Valley for climate research. The sparkling crystals
are carefully packed away until, years later, a young, unknown researcher takes
a second look at the 34,000-year-old crystals and discovers, trapped inside,
something strange. Something … alive.
Thankfully this story doesn't end with the destruction of the human
race, but with a satisfied scientist finishing his Ph.D.
"It was actually a very big surprise to me," said Brian
Schubert, who discovered ancient bacteria living within
tiny, fluid-filled chambers inside the salt crystals.
Salt
crystals grow very quickly, imprisoning whatever happens to be
floating — or living — nearby inside tiny bubbles just a few microns across,
akin to naturally made, miniature snow-globes.
"It's permanently sealed inside the salt, like little time
capsules," said Tim Lowenstein, a professor in the geology department at Binghamton University
Lowenstein said new research indicates this process occurs in modern
saline lakes, further backing up Schubert’s astounding discovery, which was
first revealed about a year ago. The new findings, along with details of
Schubert’s work, are published in the January 2011 edition of GSA Today, the
publication of the Geological Society of America
Schubert, now an assistant researcher at the University of Hawaii, said
the bacteria — a salt-loving sort still found on Earth today — were shrunken and
small, and suspended in a kind of hibernation state.
"They're alive, but they're not using any energy to swim around,
they're not reproducing," Schubert told OurAmazingPlanet. "They're
not doing anything at all except maintaining themselves."
The key to the microbes' millennia-long survival may be their fellow
captives — algae, of a group called Dunaliella.
"The most exciting part to me was when we were able to identify
the Dunaliella cells in there," Schubert said, "because
there were hints that could be a food source."
With the discovery of a potential energy source trapped alongside the
bacteria, it has begun to emerge that, like an outlandish Dr. Seuss invention
(hello, Who-ville), these tiny chambers could house entire, microscopic
ecosystems.
Other elderly bacteria?
Schubert and Lowenstein are not the first to uncover organisms that
are astonishingly
long-lived. About a decade ago, there were claims of discoveries of
250-million-year-old bacteria. The results weren't reproduced, and remain
controversial.
Schubert, however, was able to reproduce his results. Not only did he
grow the same organisms again in his own lab, he sent crystals to another lab,
which then got the same results.
"So this wasn’t something that was just a contaminant from our
lab," Schubert said.
The salt crystals get their pinkish hue from the host of microorganisms
trapped inside. Credit: Michael Timofeeff.
Survival strategy
The next step for researchers is to figure out how the microbes,
suspended in a starvation-survival mode for so many thousands of years, managed
to stay viable.
"We're not sure what's going on," Lowenstein said. "They
need to be able to repair DNA, because DNA degrades with time."
Schubert said the microbes took about two-and-a-half months to
"wake up" out of their survival state before they started to
reproduce, behavior that has been previously documented in bacteria, and a
strategy that certainly makes sense.
"It's 34,000 years old and it has a kid," Schubert said. And
ironically, once that happens, the new bacteria are, of course, entirely
modern.
Of the 900 crystal samples Schubert tested, only five produced living
bacteria. However, Schubert said, microbes are picky. Most organisms can't be
cultured in the lab, so there could be many living microbes that just didn't
like their new home enough to reproduce.
Still, wasn't it exciting to discover what could be one of the oldest
living organisms on the planet?
"It worked out very well," Schubert said.
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