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posted by Fnord666 on Friday May 01 2020, @11:59PM   Printer-friendly
from the heavy-metal dept.

Study discovers how primordial bacteria adapted to arsenic:

If you could borrow H.G. Wells' time machine and travel back three billion years, it would take your breath away, literally. There was no oxygen in the air. You wouldn't be able to breathe.

"The Earth was as alien as another planet, with no oxygen in the atmosphere, acid oceans and high levels of toxic elements like arsenic," said researcher Barry Rosen, a Distinguished Professor at the FIU Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine and a world-renowned expert on arsenic. "The first organisms had to evolve ways to detoxify arsenic to survive in that hostile environment."

Those organisms developed arsenic resistance genes that had genetic information for transport systems that pumped arsenic out of the cells and for enzymes that transformed arsenic into more complex molecules.

The research has implications for human exposure to arsenic in groundwater.


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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Saturday May 02 2020, @10:33AM (1 child)

    by FatPhil (863) <reversethis-{if.fdsa} {ta} {tnelyos-cp}> on Saturday May 02 2020, @10:33AM (#989400) Homepage
    Yet more demonstrations of the unguidedness of evolution. It only takes a few to adopt the successful strategy in adapt-or-die scenarios, and past toxins are rendered harmless. Bacteria or other organisms that can actually turn the prior toxin (remembering that oxygen can be considered as such) into something of practical use can and do pop into existence eventually. Evolution would have it no other way. (Not that the absolute earliest living things partook in precisely what we now think of as evolution, but it's near enough - those old mechanisms still run rampant. When will HeLa be considered a new "species" of life - and more importantly what is it a branch from?)
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 02 2020, @03:30PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 02 2020, @03:30PM (#989508)

    Life always finds a way - except on the Moon. Or Venus. Or Mars. Or anywhere else in the Universe that we know.