Not quite sure where I earned the honor being called a “pill” on this one.
Having been often accused of being long winded, I was trying to be brief, and so, seem to have managed to insult both sides of the “yes-its-surprising”-“no, it’s not surprising” discussion, when I meant no insult to anybody. I think the discovery is surprising, and I think it raises some pretty interesting issues of molecular taxonomy. Is the substitution of As for P the only difference in the chemistry of these critters? I don’t imagine it will be very long before somebody sequences them. I can’t wait! Nick From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of ERIC P. CHARLES Sent: Thursday, December 02, 2010 10:22 PM To: Roger Critchlow Cc: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] NASA-Funded Research Discovers Life Built With Toxic Chemical Following Glen, Roger, and James, and also wondering why Nick is being a pill.... I believe the report is of interest for showing an organism that uses arsenic in interesting ways, but it gets its magical-shininess (i.e. Science worthiness) for showing an organism that does not use phosphorous. We have never found a life form that could do the "life" thing without phosphorous. It is almost (almost) like finding an organism that uses silicon instead of carbon. Oh, and then there is the potential for practical application... like cleaning up arsenic, which is a common pollutant coming out of mines. But anything like that is a long way off. Eric On Thu, Dec 2, 2010 08:03 PM, Roger Critchlow <r...@elf.org> wrote: On Thu, Dec 2, 2010 at 4:39 PM, glen e. p. ropella <g...@tempusdictum.com> wrote: [*] FWIW, I find it odd for you to ask, of this particular article, "why is this important?" Of all the obscure, mumbo-jumbo journal articles out there (our discussion of PoMo aside ;-), it seems blatantly obvious to me that the substitution of As for P in DNA is important, even if we don't know what the implications are. I am woefully ignorant of the literature, though. Is it fairly common to find and report substitutes for DNA components? No, it's not common, it's never been reported before, all DNA and RNA in life as we have known it up until today has been based on phospho-esters. -- rec -- ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org Eric Charles Professional Student and Assistant Professor of Psychology Penn State University Altoona, PA 16601
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