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The retracted study concerned GFAJ-1, a bacterium collected in Mono Lake's arsenic-filled waters by Felisa Wolfe-Simon, then a researcher at the NASA Astrobiology Institute and the U.S. Geological Survey. Citing experiments on the microbe, she and colleagues suggested it used the normally toxic element in place of phosphorus to make DNA and proteins. A NASA release claimed the discovery "broadens our thinking about the possibility of life on other planets, and begs a rewrite of biology textbooks." But the work swiftly attracted challenges by other researchers, and attempts to replicate it failed...After controversy sparked by the paper's online publication delayed...

Transport proteins show 4,000-fold preference for phosphate over arsenate.A bacterium that some scientists thought could use arsenic in place of phosphorus in its DNA actually goes to extreme lengths to grab any traces of phosphorus it can find.The finding clears up a lingering question sparked by a controversial study1, published in Science in 2010, which claimed that the GFAJ-1 microbe could thrive in the high-arsenic conditions of Mono Lake in California without metabolizing phosphorus — an element that is essential for all forms of life.Although this and other key claims of the paper were later undermined (see 'Study challenges existence...

Amid a flurry of criticism, a NASA-funded team on Thursday backed off the more extravagant, textbook-changing claims they'd made about a bacterium that had allegedly substituted arsenic for phosphorus in its DNA. The original announcement, made at a NASA news conference Dec. 2, seemed to break a cardinal rule of biology that all organisms need some phosphorus to survive. NASA researchers claimed to have discovered an exotic organism in California's Mono Lake that lived instead on arsenic, thus broadening the types of life that may exist in the universe. The news made headlines worldwide including a New York Times story...

I gave it the front-page treatment when the big announcement was made, so now the big skeptical response gets front-page treatment too. Simply devastating — so much so that I wonder why it fell to an outfit like Slate to put it together. Did the Times or WaPo not have enough of an inkling about NASA’s discovery to survey naysayers before writing up their reports on the “discovery”? This information would have come in a lot handier when everyone was still paying attention to this story. As soon Redfield started to read the paper, she was shocked. “I was outraged...

Alan Boyle writes:NASA's secret is finally out: Researchers say they've forced microbes from a gnarly California lake to become arsenic-gobbling aliens. It may not be as thrilling as discovering life on Titan, but the claim is so radical that some chemists aren't yet ready to believe it. If the claim holds up, it would lend weight to the idea that life as we know it isn't the only way life could develop. Organisms with truly alien biochemistry could conceivably arise on a faraway exoplanet, or on the Saturnian moon Titan, or even here on Earth. "Our findings are a reminder...

Take a hastily arranged NASA press conference, add a vague allusion to an “astrobiology discovery,” and you’ve got a recipe for mass web-fueled speculation that E.T. is finally coming home. On Tuesday, the U.S. space agency announced a press conference to be held at 2pm EST on Thursday to “discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.” While that brief teaser is all NASA has said on the issue, many others have since taken to the web to complete the narrative. “If I had to guess at what NASA is going to reveal on...

They thrive without oxygen, growing in salty, alkaline conditions, and may offer insights into what kinds of life might survive on Mars. They're a new species of organism, isolated by scientists at the National Space Science and Technology Center (NSSTC) in Huntsville, Ala. The discovery, published in the May 2003 issue of the International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology, identifies a species named Spirochaeta americana by the two NSSTC scientists -- Richard Hoover and Dr. Elena Pikuta. They isolated this new organism from oxygen-deprived mud sediments from Northern California's Mono Lake - a salty, alkaline lake in an enclosed...