Will colonizing meteorites and asteroids with bacteria one day save life as we know it?

By Alex Ballingall - Wednesday, July 20, 2011 at 8:55 AM - 15 Comments

iStock, Getty Images; Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute

The world is doomed. Even if we avoid annihilation by climate change or nuclear holocaust, the inevitable expansion of the sun will surely do us in. Or will it?

Michael Mautner, professor of chemistry and astroecology at Virginia Commonwealth University, has a plan to save life as we know it. Called directed panspermia, it’s meant to maintain Earth’s evolutionary path, although it might be described as spraying bacteria into space.

Mautner became interested in the idea when he was studying at New York’s Rockefeller University in the early 1970s. It was there, in the midst of the Cold War’s nuclear standoff, that he felt “our survival really became a question.” He’s been advocating directed panspermia ever since. In 1995, he founded the Panspermia Society for Life in Space, and for most of his professional life, he has studied whether microbes can survive on asteroids and meteorites in space. This, he says, is necessary for directed panspermia to work.

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It's life, but not as we know it

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, December 16, 2010 at 10:20 AM - 4 Comments

Wolfe-Simon takes samples from the shore of Mono Lake | Henry Bortman

Last week, NASA scientists gathered to reveal a discovery they promised would “impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.” The public’s expectations couldn’t have been higher: widely read blogger Jason Kottke mused the space agency might even have found signs of life on another planet. But when NASA finally lifted the curtain on its finding—which turned out to be not a real-life alien, but a lowly microbe here on Earth—there was a collective yawn.

Even so, it’s not every day NASA says our biology textbooks should be rewritten. Life is thought to require six basic building blocks to exist: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. This bacteria, dug up from the salty, arsenic-rich mud of Mono Lake in eastern California, defies that expectation. As astrobiologist Felisa Wolfe-Simon and her team found, the microbe, called GFAJ-1, seems to swap arsenic for some of its phosphorus, incorporating the toxin into its DNA, proteins and cell membranes. (University of British Columbia professor Rosie Redfield slammed the research, which was published in the peer-reviewed journal Science, calling it “flim-flam” on her blog.)

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Superbug: meet your maker

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, September 16, 2010 at 2:00 PM - 0 Comments

Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters/ Jacquelyn Martin/AP

In his lab at United Arab Emirates University in Al-Ain, John Michael Conlon collects the secretions that ooze out of frog skins. Over the past 12 years, he’s collected hundreds of samples from frogs all around the world (the one Canadian frog in his collection is the wood frog). Conlon’s hoping to find an antibiotic that could fight off powerful “superbugs,” bacteria that our current drugs can’t beat. Frogs have spent millions of years evolving to fight off microbes, he explains: they live in a moist, warm environment, “an ideal place for the growth of bacteria and fungi.” After analyzing just 200 secretions, Conlon’s team has found over 100 antimicrobial substances.

With drug-resistant bacteria on the rise, they can’t work fast enough. Last month, The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal published a study showing that NDM-1, a gene that makes bacteria impervious to some of our strongest antibiotics and can jump from one bacterial strain to another, has the potential to become a global health problem. Thought to have originated in India, NDM-1 positive bacteria has already turned up in several countries, including Canada. Other superbugs, like MRSA (a staph bacteria that resists the methicillin antibiotic), are also a growing concern. “I’m English, and English people tend to deal in understatements, not exaggerations,” Conlon says dryly. “This situation really is serious.”

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Is there anything they can't do?

By Kate Lunau - Tuesday, November 11, 2008 at 11:28 AM - 2 Comments

In the current issue of Maclean’s, I wrote about a global effort to track all the bacteria that live in the human body—a monumental undertaking, since they outnumber our own cells by ten-to-one. It may gross people out to think we’re literally crawling with bugs, but a growing body of research suggests they’re crucial to our health: by now, microbes have been implicated in everything from periodontitis, to obesity, to premature labour.

Today, a new study caught my eye: it looks like bacteria even affect the taste of the food we eat. In the human mouth—where each tooth seems to have its own unique bacterial colony—microbes create food odours from odourless components, allowing us to fully taste fruits and veggies, a Swiss team is reporting.

Some fruits and vegetables release their characteristic odours only after being swallowed, researchers report in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry (to be published Nov. 12). The team performed sensory tests on 30 trained panelists using grapes, onions and bell peppers, and found that the food’s odourless compounds are processed by bacteria in the mouth, which creates this so-called “retroaromatic” effect. “The mouth acts as a reactor, adding another dimension to odor perceptions,” they said.

Queen’s University’s Dr. Elaine Petrof recently told Maclean’s, “Everyone talks about going to the Amazon rainforest to look for new species. But we’ve got all this stuff inside our own bodies that we don’t know anything about.” As our research into the human microbiome continues, there’s no telling what we could find.

Eradicating a bad bacteria

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, October 9, 2008 at 12:00 AM - 0 Comments

The town motto of Aklavik, an Arctic hamlet huddled at the Mackenzie River Delta in the Northwest Territories, is “Never Say Die.” So when the close-knit community of 600 noticed an alarming trend—a high number of people were getting sick with stomach cancer—they decided to act. “In the past, we hardly ever buried anyone except elders. The graveyard wasn’t touched for so long,” says child-care worker Annie Buckle, 54. Now, “there’s a new gravesite. You’d be surprised by the dates [on the headstones].” Buckle says she lost her mother to stomach cancer last year.

The culprit, residents believed, was a common bacteria: Helicobacter pylori. The spiral-shaped bug, which lives in the human stomach or intestine, is a major cause of gastric cancer and peptic ulcer disease. (Gastric cancer is the second most common cancer among Inuit men, but ranks 10th overall for Canadian men.) So, the community invited a medical team from Edmonton and Yellowknife to investigate. In February, 27 doctors, nurses and researchers descended on Aklavik, surveying 314 people and endoscoping 193. Among 255 people given a breath test for H. pylori, 57 per cent came back positive. Buckle was one of them: she took a preventative 10-day course of antibiotics to rid herself of the bug. All who tested positive, symptomatic or not, will be offered treatment.

Humans have lived with H. pylori for over 50,000 years. Now, across the developed world, it’s rapidly going extinct. A century ago, it’s thought that nearly everyone had it in their stomachs; today, thanks to clean water, better hygiene and antibiotics, just five per cent of people born in the 1990s do, according to one U.S. study. (The bacteria, which is transmitted orally or fecally, is more prevalent in rural and developing areas.) The bene?ts of eradicating H. pylori have been great. “Ulcer disease is going away; stomach cancer is going away,” says Dr. Martin Blaser, chair of the Department of Medicine at the New York University School of Medicine, whose work was instrumental in linking H. pylori to gastric cancer. But as those ailments disappear, “new diseases are rising,” he adds.

And the loss of H. pylori could be partly to blame. A growing body of research suggests the bug might not just cause ulcers and cancer—it could actually prevent some diseases, too. As H. pylori is wiped out, a host of health problems are on the rise: more than half of the population in Canada is now overweight or obese. Over 15 per cent of kids aged four to 11 suffer from childhood asthma. Six million Canadians have gastroesophageal reflux disease (better known as GERD), when stomach contents splash up into the esophagus. Could the much-maligned bacteria actually protect against these conditions? Blaser believes it might. “If the world is more complicated than what was originally proposed, then so be it,” he says. “The question is, what’s the truth?”