http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20090615/sc_livescience/microbewakesupafter120000years Is this cool, scary, or both?
120,000 year old bacteria being exposed or released to our current time and world? I am going with scary WHEN this gets out.....(it always gets out in the movies)....!
Thanks for the article brother. Bacterial spores are an amazing feat of nature. I recently germinated spores that I isolated from mined sands from the Lane Mountain company. I sequenced the 16S rRNA gene and three of the organisms had previously been isolated from deep ocean deposits. Needless to say, it has been quite a while since Washington state was under water.
In this case, just cool. These three organisms are still cruising around under the oceans off the coast of Japan and Greece (and probably many other places) but it does show the range of bacteria and, since these organisms, to the best of my knowledge, have only previously been isolated from marine environments, that they have probably been in spore form since the time when Washington state was under water. I am not sure when that was but my guess is that it was many moons ago.
I don't envision it being scary. Ancient microbes would probably not find humans to be good hosts and, given the temperature and environment from where these bugs were isolated (low oxygen, low nutrients), makes it even less likely. Ancient microbes would have to evolve a relationship with humans to be a threat and, the fact is, the overwhelming majority of microorganisms are not pathogenic.
So what you are saying is that it would probably take modern day scientists studying these ancient bacteria and running tests on them and accidently introducing them to some proper temperature and environment that causes a reaction no one predicted thus reeking havic on our once non-infected species. Pheww...luckily that isnt happening....
Naw, bacteria are pretty specialized when it comes to temperature, nutritional needs, osmotic conditions, pressure, etc. If you isolated a bug at freezing temperatures, they probably lack the functional genes to make molecular chaperones to deal with a human's body temperature and, as such, die almost immediately when exposed to human body temperatures.
How about two western digital velociraptors in my computer? One day the super germ will break out watch. I know it. It'll be like Motaba.
well in all fairness most people aren't afraid of things they know. they are afraid of the unknown................
