Microbes locked in Antarctic ice for as much as eight million
years have been "resuscitated" in a laboratory. Now that the
ice at both poles is
melting,
could this be dangerous?
Scientists melted down samples of ice from Antarctica
glaciers, some of which are 8 million years old. The oldest
living thing they discovered is a 600,000-year-old bacteria.
Once the water was warmed up, the microbes became active
again.
In LiveScience.com, Jeanna Bryner quotes researcher Thomas
Gilbert as saying, "The colder you make the environment, the
longer [DNA] survives. In places like Mars and [Jupiter's
moon] Europa, which are really, really cold, DNA may very
well be surviving there for a hell of a long time."
BBC News reports that "the findings raise the possibility that
ancient bugs, long frozen in ice, will return to life as climate
change causes the glaciers to melt, flushing their genetic
material into the oceans. However, experts say this process
has been going on for billions of years, and is unlikely to
cause human disease."
What about contamination?could these actually be modern
microbes that have been misidentified? BBC quotes
Copenhagen researcher Eske Willerslev as warning that
contamination of samples with genetic material from modern
microbes is always a possibility. He says, "These results show
patterns that you can't easily explain by contamination, but I
would feel more comfortable with the results if they had been
replicated in two independent labs."
But US researcher David Marchant says that temperatures in
the areas that were excavated were so cold that any liquid
melting on the surface could only have penetrated a tiny way
down into the ice, and all samples were taken from below this
level, so "there's really no chance for modern contamination."
Art credit: freeimages.co.uk
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