{"id":596,"date":"2006-01-25T12:54:08","date_gmt":"2006-01-25T17:54:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/2006\/01\/25\/extremophilia\/"},"modified":"2006-01-25T12:54:08","modified_gmt":"2006-01-25T17:54:08","slug":"extremophilia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2006\/01\/25\/extremophilia\/","title":{"rendered":"Extremophilia"},"content":{"rendered":"

D. RadioduransThe Astronomy Picture of the Day<\/a> from Sunday was a cool one — a nutrient agar plate of Deinococcus radiodurans<\/em><\/a>, a\/k\/a “Conan the Bacterium.” (Photo: M. Daly, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences.) D. rad<\/em> is quite the remarkable little microbe — it’s an extremophile<\/a>, an organism that thrives in conditions that you and I would deem overly harsh. (And no, not the internet.) It even has a listing in the Guinness Book of World Records<\/em> under “World’s Toughest Bacterium.”<\/p>\n

D. rad<\/em> is able to survive in vacuum and through extremes of temperature as well as dehydration, but its special ability is to shrug off large amounts of radiation: a dosage 3,000 times what would kill a strapping young human. Now, you may perhaps wonder why the Intelligent Designer would bother to equip a certain unicellular organism with such an impressive, but not manifestly adaptive, kind of superpower. It could be that radiation tolerance was quite useful in the environment of the very young Earth, but biologists are also thinking that the radiation resistance may come along with resistance to dehydration (which is something that obviously is useful) — radiation and dehydration seem to cause similar types of DNA damage, and D. rad<\/em> has a remarkable ability to keep its DNA in good working order. It carries along several copies of its genome, stacked on top of each other, ready to step in at the first sign of damage. It’s like towing an entire repair shop behind your car at all times.<\/p>\n

Which means, of course, that we meddling humans want to put it to work. D. rad<\/em> has already been genetically engineered<\/a> to clean up spills of toxic mercury, which can be highly radioactive. And now, NASA is exploring the possibility of recruiting the plucky bacteria into the astronaut corps<\/a>. They are imagining adapting D. rad<\/em> to help with a variety of tasks that humans might face on a trip to Mars — synthesizing drugs, recycling wastes, producing food, all the way up to terraforming<\/a> the planet. If I were in charge of this project, I would tread pretty lightly here. These are some tough bacteria — I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re just biding their time until we can fly them to Mars, at which point they’ll rise up and take over both<\/em> planets.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Astronomy Picture of the Day from Sunday was a cool one — a nutrient agar plate of Deinococcus radiodurans, a\/k\/a “Conan the Bacterium.” (Photo: M. Daly, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences.) D. rad is quite the remarkable little microbe — it’s an extremophile, an organism that thrives in conditions that you and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-596","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=596"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}