- LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists
in the United States have revived a 250-million-year-old bacteria that
is believed to be the oldest living creature ever discovered.
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- The bacterium that lived millions of years before the
dinosaurs was in a state of suspended animation in an ancient salt crystal
in an underground cavern near Carlsbad, New Mexico.
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- ``From a biological standpoint this is extremely significant
because quite literally this organism is the next best thing to having
been there,'' Russell Vreeland, a microbiologist at West Chester University
in Pennsylvania, said in a telephone interview.
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- Hundred-million-year-old fossils and rocks give geologists
clues about the Earth's past but until now researchers have not had anything
to reveal the secrets of life that long ago.
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- ``Now we have at least one organism that goes back that
far that we can ask biological questions of...something that we couldn't
do before,'' Vreeland added.
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- The fact that Vreeland and his colleagues were able to
bring the sleeping bacterium, called Bacillus permians, back to life after
so long opens up the possibility that bacterial spores could live indefinitely.
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- ``If something can survive 250 million years, what's
the difference in another 250 or longer,'' Vreeland said.
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- The bacterium was trapped in a tiny brine pocket in the
salt from ancient rock formations.
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- ``It was completely protected,'' said Vreeland, whose
research is published in the science journal Nature.
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- ``It was able to shut itself down into a protective spore
and once it was encased within this particular type of rock it found itself
in the most stable environment that you could imagine.''
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- The scientists carefully drilled into the crystal under
the most sterile conditions, extracted fluid from it, placed the fluid
in sealed test tubes and incubated it until it grew.
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- The extraordinary age of the bacterium also begs the
question of whether organisms can survive long enough to travel between
planets.
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- ``If an organism were encased in a crystal and blown
off a planet somewhere, or blown off of this one due to a meteor collision,
it has a reasonable probability of surviving long enough to travel not
just from planet to planet but solar system to solar system,'' Vreeland
said.
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- The scientists are comparing the bacterium to its modern
relatives and are now looking for even older organisms.
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- ``We are already starting to look at some 500-million-year-old
and 800-million-year-old samples and we're working on some that are even
older than that,'' Vreeland added.
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