NASA Finds new life...in Mono Lake

Mono Lake, for those of you who haven't been there, is a pretty extreme place. Located downslope of the Eastern Sierra Nevada, north of Mammoth and right near the entrance to Yosemite National Park at Tioga Pass, it's a lake characterized by amazingly high salinity and alkalinity. Very little lives in it, save for some species of shrimp. It is also a breeding ground for over 90% of seagulls in the state, making it a pretty important place.

But as of an announcement today, this place also apparently has some residents which are pretty mind-blowing. Researchers from NASA, the US Geological Survey, and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have found a microbe that uses something in its biological structure that no other organism on earth can: arsenic. See, every living thing on earth, from you to your cat to a squid, uses the same six elements for life: Oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, sulfur and phosphorous. But a particular strain of Gamaproteobacteria found in Mono Lake completely changes that assumption. The researchers grew this particular bacterium in the lab, feeding it these elements, including phosphorus. But when they removied phosphorus and added arsenic instead, something astounding happened: the bacteria kept growing. Somehow, though more work needs to be done, the bacteria are incorporating the normally extremely poisonous element into their cellular structure.

This is a big deal, mind you. It may not sound like much, but this creates a whole other view of how life can exist, both here on Earth, and (for astrobiologists) on other planets. I'm pretty excited to see where this goes from here!