[HN Gopher] Scientists pull living microbes, possibly 100M years...
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Scientists pull living microbes, possibly 100M years old, from
beneath the sea
Author : walterbell
Score : 97 points
Date : 2020-07-28 16:11 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sciencemag.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sciencemag.org)
| rbartelme wrote:
| It's a big logical leap to the conclusion that this will "doom us
| all". It's even sillier to be afraid of sediment core incubation
| experiments with destructive sampling techniques. Don't you
| think?
| dreen wrote:
| People automatically fear things that in some way may exceed
| some of their own limitations, in however minor way. A defense
| mechanism of our cavemen brains.
| cerealbad wrote:
| Anyone with a passing interest in this or adjacent fields should
| check out the Deep Carbon Observatory website.
|
| https://deepcarbon.net/worlds-oldest-groundwater-supports-li...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfate-reducing_microorganism...
| dumbfoundded wrote:
| I wonder if there's any depth we've searched where we haven't
| found life. It looks like life is everywhere we look. Is there
| anywhere on Earth there isn't some microbe living?
| hosteur wrote:
| In the center?
| dumbfoundded wrote:
| It's kind of hard to look there.
| Someone wrote:
| Reading
| https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2017/04/deepest-
| life..., scientists think temperatures above 250F (120 degC)
| aren't compatible with life as we know it (carbon-based, using
| water), and, because of that, there isn't life below 6 miles
| down.
|
| Reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanopyrus, about a
| microbe that "can survive and reproduce at 122 degC", that
| limit may be based on observation, rather than first
| principles. Regardless, I would take it with a grain of salt.
| close04 wrote:
| Some archaea species like Geogemma barosii [0] can survive
| and reproduce at temperatures above 121 degC (the temperature
| used in many autoclaves for example).
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strain_121
| dumbfoundded wrote:
| That's pretty awesome that the only limitations of life on
| Earth appear to be pressure and temperature.
| nuccy wrote:
| Just to put a bit of a context here, life exists on Earth for 4
| billion years (single celled), and 1.5 billion years
| (multicellular) [1]. There were few mass extinction events in
| the history of Earth, at least 5 happened in the last 540
| million years with up to 50% of life disappearing [2]. There
| were before periods with much more diverse life, than what we
| have now, so probably life before occupied the whole planet
| [3], obviously not all of that species left themselves in
| fossils, so exact numbers are a matter of big debates.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_evolutionary_h...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambrian_explosion
| close04 wrote:
| > 50% of life
|
| Worse, 50% of species. And the P-T extinction was the worst
| with an estimated 96% of all marine species and 70% of
| terrestrial vertebrates becoming extinct.
| mrtri wrote:
| how they know it's 100M years old? carbon dating goes max 50,000
| years back, other radiodating methods are not accurate, they
| dated newly formed lava stones in hawaii and came with million
| year old numbers, besides if a microbe died on a old rock doesnt
| mean it is as old as the rock.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Maybe now the bacteria revived from 40Mya amber are believable.
| freedomben wrote:
| Related: I recently read "The Story of Earth" by Robert Hazen and
| it's a fascinating read. Highly recommend. The author also has a
| few Great Courses courses. "The Origin and Evolution of Earth" is
| a companion to the book (it covers much of the same material) but
| the two together left me with significant retention of the
| material. It's fascinating to go out hiking now with my kids and
| be able to entertain and educate them with facts about the rocks
| and formations we are hiking on :-)
| sradman wrote:
| The paper _Aerobic microbial life persists in oxic marine
| sediment as old as 101.5 million years_ [1]:
|
| > Our results suggest that microbial communities widely
| distributed in organic-poor abyssal sediment consist mainly of
| aerobes that retain their metabolic potential under extremely
| low-energy conditions for up to 101.5 Ma.
|
| > Dominant bacterial groups included Actinobacteria,
| Bacteroidetes, Firmicutes, Alphaproteobacteria,
| Betaproteobacteria, Gammaproteobacteria, and Deltaproteobacteria
| (Fig. 3b, c) with a minor fraction of Chloroflexi (0- 2.6%).
|
| It seems that it is the conditions that extends life since such a
| diverse community of aerobes was "reanimated".
|
| [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17330-1
| benmcnelly wrote:
| Do you want zombies, this is how you get zombies... /kidding of
| course(mostly)!
| walterbell wrote:
| But, but .. we did that in 1997-2005 for Spanish flu and
| nothing (?) happened.
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/437794a
|
| _> It is thought to have killed 50 million people, and yet
| scientists have brought it back to life ... Working out how it
| arose and why it was so deadly could help experts to spot the
| next pandemic strain and to design appropriate drugs and
| vaccines in time, they say. But others have raised concerns
| that the dangers of resurrecting the virus are just too great.
| One biosecurity expert told Nature that the risk that the
| recreated strain might escape is so high, it is almost a
| certainty._
|
| Grave digging: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-
| resources/reconstruction-19...
| 42droids wrote:
| It's 2020. What can go wrong?
| amacbride wrote:
| [gestures broadly at everything]
| Zenst wrote:
| with 2020 having less than 50% chance over 2021 of something
| going wrong, I feel kinda upbeet. Maybe these microbes escape
| and end up curing cancer!
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| It's like they have never read H.P. Lovecraft.
| vz8 wrote:
| Remember the Mayan calendar brouhaha over 2012? They just
| forgot to carry the 1.
|
| And here we are.
| felipemnoa wrote:
| Would have made a great movie. "The Mayans were off by 8
| years"
| nkrisc wrote:
| I'm sure the Mayan's original paper they submitted for peer
| review had the appropriate margins or error detailed, it
| was just lost once the newspapers picked it up.
| _Microft wrote:
| Let me guess - it would begin like this: a scientist
| sitting at their desk late at night (at home, old
| furniture, bookshelves in the background, the table covered
| with papers and scrolls, faint light of an desk lamp (green
| lampshade?), maybe an open fire bickering offscreen)
| suddenly grabbing a paper, looking closer, adjusting their
| glasses, then starting to flip pages in a book, looking
| again at the paper, covering their mouth with a hand,
| jumping up, tapping a spot on the paper, rolling it up
| before grabbing a coat from the coat rack, ...
| detaro wrote:
| Waking up ancients sleeping under the sea for aeons, sounds
| perfectly safe to me.
| est31 wrote:
| I've heard that there is a hard limit of about 1 million years to
| recover ancient DNA because of deterioration processes [1].
| Wouldn't their DNA have deteriorated by now? Or is it being
| constantly repaired?
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_DNA
| Knufen wrote:
| You can 'reverse engineer' DNA. Though the DNA strand itself
| deteriorates rather quickly given the time scales. The peptide
| bond are extremely robust and can be used to recreate the
| original DNA string or at least some semblance of it.
| gus_massa wrote:
| Some parts of the DNA are not transcribed, for example the
| "Promoters" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promoter_(genetics)
| They are important so some proteins are build only when the
| they are needed. For a more concrete example, see
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac_operon
| Jabbles wrote:
| It's probably being constantly repaired - though ofc I have no
| knowledge of these particular microbes:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_repair
| senkora wrote:
| They seem to speculate that the cells have been in a low-energy
| state where they either divide very slowly or spend all of
| their energy repairing broken molecules, which would presumably
| include their own DNA.
|
| My own (baseless) speculation: Maybe the population was
| originally much larger, and the surviving cells have been
| maintaining the energy to live by slowly cannibalizing each
| other over millions of years?
| tomcam wrote:
| They don't look a day over 61 million
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(page generated 2020-07-28 23:00 UTC)