Scientists pull living microbes, possibly 100M years old, from beneath the sea

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/scientists-pull-living-microbes-100-million-years-beneath-sea

by walterbell • 6 years ago

157 60 6 years ago

sciencemag.org

42droids• 6 years ago

It’s 2020. What can go wrong?

amacbride• 6 years ago

[gestures broadly at everything]

Zenst• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

It's like they have never read H.P. Lovecraft.

vikramkr2• 6 years ago

Even if you've read HP lovecraft, the lessons contained are pretty specific to the 1920s. Air conditioning, non-euclidian geometry, previously unknown colors, cities, black people, poor white people, immigrants, native americans, interracial marriage, basically anyone that lovecraft didn't like, are all eeeevil. scary.

vz8• 6 years ago

Remember the Mayan calendar brouhaha over 2012? They just forgot to carry the 1.

And here we are.

felipemnoa4• 6 years ago

Would have made a great movie. "The Mayans were off by 8 years"

detaro• 6 years ago

Waking up ancients sleeping under the sea for aeons, sounds perfectly safe to me.

dumbfoundded4• 6 years ago

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?

nuccy• 6 years ago

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

close042• 6 years ago

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.

Someone• 6 years ago

Reading https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2017/04/deepest-life..., scientists think temperatures above 250F (120 °C) 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 °C”, that limit may be based on observation, rather than first principles. Regardless, I would take it with a grain of salt.

close042• 6 years ago

Some archaea species like Geogemma barosii [0] can survive and reproduce at temperatures above 121 °C (the temperature used in many autoclaves for example).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strain_121

hosteur• 6 years ago

In the center?

dumbfoundded4• 6 years ago

It's kind of hard to look there.

ornxka• 6 years ago

Life is virtually everywhere, appreciable levels of biodiversity are not. Things get smaller, slower, simpler, and fewer as you start to move towards the fringe.

dumbfoundded4• 6 years ago

I'm not sure how biodiversity is measured for single celled organisms. I always thought the genetic variation was higher for the domain Archaea whereas the genetic variation was smaller for other domains but led to much more different emergent properties.

zxcvbn4038• 6 years ago

Let’s hope the life on Mars was just as robust.

ncmncm• 6 years ago

Maybe now the bacteria revived from 40Mya amber are believable.

est31• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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

senkora• 6 years ago

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?

Jabbles• 6 years ago

It's probably being constantly repaired - though ofc I have no knowledge of these particular microbes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_repair

vikramkr2• 6 years ago

If the microbes were dead then yes. If they are still alive, presumably they've been doing a basic level of life stuff for the past 100 million years which involves replicating and preserving DNA.

benmcnelly• 6 years ago

Do you want zombies, this is how you get zombies... /kidding of course(mostly)!

walterbell• 6 years ago

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...

sradman• 6 years ago

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

cerealbad• 6 years ago

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...

rbartelme• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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.

zipwitch• 6 years ago

SF author and marine biologist Peter Watts has a trilogy on a very similar premise, where an early "fork" of life (that is actually more efficient than our entire tree of life) got stuck down in the ocean depths at the dawn of time, until we accidentally bring it up.

https://rifters.com/real/shorts.htm

ilstormcloud• 6 years ago

A lot of people including myself would agree with you. But 2020 has been bruising on our mental health so we're not taking any chances.

tomcam2• 6 years ago

They don’t look a day over 61 million

valuearb• 6 years ago

They attribute it to regular workouts.

Igelau• 6 years ago

Does my pseudopod look fat to you? How about now?

tomcam2• 6 years ago

Dear, you always look wonderful to me.

freedomben• 6 years ago

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 :-)

rajekas• 6 years ago

Makes me think that panspermia isn't so outlandish. 100 million years will get you from star system to star system with plenty of time to spare.

waheoo• 6 years ago

Has work been done on figuring out how long it would take to develop DNA/RNAthrough evolution?

I.e. has the earth been around long enough?

ericbarrett• 6 years ago

The fossil record indicates life on Earth appeared no later than about 800,000,000 years after it first formed, and possibly much sooner.

While there’s no real evidence for panspermia, it is a fun topic to read about. I recall one hypothesis is that DNA (or RNA) based life evolved shortly after the Big Bang (500,000 years?) when the universe was a balmy lumpy-gas bath of 0-100C. If this were true, it would follow that life is as pervasive as the cosmic background radiation and we should expect to find it in every crevice. Mind-bending.

aesh2Xa1• 6 years ago

Yes, there are even competing theories of DNA versus RNA as the sort of precursor self-replicating molecules. See "RNA World" and "Primordial Soup" theories.

RNA makes for an interesting candidate because of enzymatic activity. Similar molecules could enzymatically consume, build, and "compete" with one another.

To my knowledge, there are many computer simulations, but I don't know an exact figure for "how long would it take given X (some axiom of the state of the Earth). Here's a paper I found quickly. I promise I didn't choose that institute/university on purpose.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03032...

The panspermia hypothesis is also supported rather recently.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6900709

cgriswald4• 6 years ago

It still seems pretty outlandish at an interstellar scale. Life would have to survive ejection, survive space, actually hit a target, survive injection, and be compatible with the new environment.

All that and life still has to evolve somewhere in the first place.

nix234• 6 years ago

survive ejection, survive space, actually hit a target, survive injection,

Billions of Bacteria's have billions of chances.

and be compatible with the new environment

Water from 0-98C

imvetri• 6 years ago

Isn't this a repost ? I remember reading similar article last year

Scientists pull living microbes, possibly 100M years old, from beneath the sea

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