Spaceflight Now is reporting that, within the next few days, NASA plans to publicly discuss new research concerning ALH 84001, the Martian meteorite found in Allan Hills, Antarctica. The research is said to strengthen the findings of the team that studied the meteorite over a decade ago and announced in 1996 that the meteorite might contain evidence of bacterial life.

The new research, detailed in a 46-page peer reviewed paper, looks at magnetic bacteria found on Earth. The researchers have closely studied magnetic bacteria and the formations they create in rocks. The bacteria leave distinctive remnants in the rock, uniquely-shaped magnetite crystals that test with a chemical purity that reflects biological, rather than geological, origins. That these remnants are unique to magnetic bacteria on Earth and are also found in the Allan Hills meteorite strongly suggests that the crystals indicate ancient bacterial life on Mars.

Critics of the original NASA report have doubted these features as reliable fossils, claiming that the shape and chemical purity could be achieved by the same thermal shock that separated the material from Mars in the first place. But new research reported in the paper disproves the thermal shock theory.

Spaceflight says that the new research isn't quite a "smoking gun," but it greatly strengthens the case for life on Mars, and could change the conversation about future NASA missions.

Martian meteorite surrenders new secrets of possible life [Spaceflight via Universe Today]

A group of students at the University of Edinburgh have engineered a bacteria that glows bright green when it comes in contact with the chemicals that leech into the soil from buried explosives. The bacteria could be mixed into a colorless solution, and sprayed over the minefield from the air, showing bright green after a few hours. This would be a great improvement over the current slow, and decidedly dangerous methods of finding mines in existing mine fields. The students who created the bacteria say it is cheap to produce, and harmless to humans and animals, though they didn't mention its effects on local plant life.

The developers explain:

We suggest that the bacteria are dropped from a low flying aircraft which will evenly disperse the bacteria across the expected landmine field. This will allow the ground to be covered in the bacteria which will then respond to any TNT or Nitrites that it discovers in the soil. After darkness, which will give the bacteria enough time to produce the proteins which emit light and EYFP, a plane could then fly over the area once again and mark down the location of any luminescence found in the soil, for further investigation. This will provide a much safer method than having a person in the field detecting the landmines.

The bacteria will be engineered with a "kill switch" will turn off their luminescence after a few hours.

While the developers of the mine sensing bacteria have no plans to commercialize their discovery, they noted that the substance would cost approximately £0.013 per square meter where it is sprayed. So this is could be a fairly low-cost solution too, depending on the size of affected areas.

The bacteria were created for the iGem contest using a technique known as BioBricking. BioBricks are chunks of DNA sequence, each of which has a known function, and can be combined with others. It's like nanoscale biological lego: each piece has a specific function, and when combined with other pieces, the larger unit retains connectivity, so it can then be fitted onto other BioBricks. It's a technique that was developed by MIT in 2003, as a way of providing a library of biological parts, with the long-term goal of producing a synthetic living organism from standard parts.

via University of Edinburgh and iGem

Image of glowing bacteria via Maker Faire.

More information about the organisms, the project, and her travels is available at Sussman's blog.

The Oldest Living Things in the World [Rachel Sussman via The Long Now]

La Llareta, up to 3,300 years old
Sagole Baobab, 2,000 years old
Clonal Creosote Bush, 12,000 years old
Siberian Actinobacteria, about 400,000 years old
Jomon Sugi Japanese Cedar, 7,000 years old
Lichen R. Geographicum, about 3,000 years old
Clonal Quaking Aspens, 80,000 years old
Underground Forest, 13,000 years old
Welwitschia Mirabilis, 2,000 years old
Clonal Mojave Yucca, over 12,000 years old

Dr. Cathy Shachaf's team at the Stanford University School of Medicine has developed a nanoparticle application that she expects will allow doctors to examine up to 100 distinct features in individual cancer cells — similar to how radioactive dyes are now used to highlight organs for more traditional scanning technologies. Shachaf and her term successfully integrated Raman signal emitting molecules with composite organic-inorganic nanoparticles (COINs) from Intel to boost the strength of the signals and allow the team to track changes in the functioning of certain proteins in leukemia cells that play a role in cancer development.

Two other teams are using nanoparticles to combat drug-resistant bacteria. The first team, based at the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology in Singapore, are specifically interested in using peptide nanoparticles to penetrate the blood-brain barrier in order to combat brain infections. In their studies, they've not only demonstrated that the peptide nanoparticles can — unlike most antibiotics - penetrate that barrier and successfully target bacterial, yeast or viral infections. Because of their small size, the nanoparticles enter the attacking cells, causing them to die — but without affecting normal human cells.

Brown University researchers Thomas Webster and Erik Taylor are using iron-ozide nanoparticles to kill the bacteria Staphylococcus epidermidis that has a tendency to accumulate on medical devices in therapeutic settings. The staph bacteria is particularly difficult to eliminate from medical implants — like knee and hip replacements — and often result in a full removal of the device. But Webster and Taylor found that the iron oxide nanoparticles can be forced through the bacterial cell walls with the use of magnets, virtually eliminating the staff infection from the device and — reportedly — encouraging normal bone growth around the implant.

Of course, all of this works right up until the nanoparticles give you the cancer other scientists have predicted they will.

Harnessing nanoparticles to track cancer cell changes [Nanowerk]
Singapore nanotechnology combats fatal brain infections [EurekAlert]
Implant Bacteria, Beware: Researchers Create Nano-sized Assassins [Science Daily]

[Image via the National Science Foundation]

The scientists found the bacteria, named Herminiimonas glaciei, buried under nearly 2 miles worth of ice in Greenland. Scientists think that, since it's small even for bacteria, it survives on nutrients trapped in veins of ice and uses its flagella to move within veins to seek food.

It took the scientists almost a year to revive the bacteria and coax it to grow; once it did, it yielded small colonies of purple-brown bacteria. Although not as old as the 8 million year old bacteria resurrected from Antarctic ice in 2007, it does lead the Penn State scientists to believe that they might be able to find and re-grow bacteria from Mars or Jupiter's moon Europa:

All we can say is that because ice is the best medium to preserve nucleic acids, other organic compounds and cells, the potential for finding them in these environments is quite high because of the cold... It gives us hope that if something is there, we can locate it.

Because that turned out well for scientists in Species.

'Resurrection bug' revived after 120,000 years [New Scientist]
Eight-million-year-old bug is alive and growing [New Scientist]

Professor Werner Müller, a molecular biologist with a background in sea research, and his team of mostly Chinese scientists have discovered that manganese nodules and manganese and cobalt crusts that line the deep ocean floor actually have their roots in organic life forms.

Müller and his research partners have found complete chains of bacteria with S-layers in manganese nodules that provided the basis for the synthesis of the biomaterials. "Once the primary layer is present, autocatalysis takes over and the material completes the process itself."

The bacteria starts the process by which manganese is automatically extracted from sea water, forming nodules.

The manganese or colbalt crusts are started by dead unicellular algae.

They are created by coccolithophorides, a form of armoured algae that are completely encased in a protective shell of calcium carbonate. These algae live at a depth of around 100 metres. When they die, their protective shells fall to deeper levels where bonds with manganese ions are formed by means of chemical transformation.

Both crusts contain valuable raw materials for modern manufacturing processes that are in short supply.

Müller and his team think that, if they can replicate the manner by which the bacteria and algae extract the minerals from sea water, they can head off a growing international crisis.

"Perhaps we can use nature as our model, so that in future we will also be able to exploit algae and bacteria to extract manganese and other metals from a seawater environment," explains Müller. This could help to defuse potential future conflict for resources and contribute to sustainable production, without damaging the deep-sea environment.

Currently, nations that even lack the technological capacity to extract nodules or mine the sea floor for minerals are attempting to stake claims to vast swaths of the ocean floor in the hopes that they will be able to have some control over the mineral rights down the line. Müller hopes to head off this future (and potentially armed) conflict by engineering the bacteria and algae to do their transformative work on land, rather than at the depths of the ocean floor. What could possibly go wrong with that?

Bacteria And Algae Act As Biocatalysts For Deep-sea Raw Material Deposition [Science Daily]

[Image via NIAID/NIH]

This superstrength could make the bacteria the perfect ingredient in nanotech devices that have to exert strong pulls on objects around them. Many scientists are already repurposing viruses and bacteria for use in nanotech machines, and now bacteria's mega-power may make it the killer app.

According to New Scientist:

Scientists knew that Neisseria gonorhoeae bacteria use "type four" pili to crawl along a surface and to attach to cells and infect them.

What they didn't know was that these bacteria can bundle pili together to exert long, strong pulls. Michael Sheetz and colleagues at Columbia University in New York put the bacteria in a field of tiny gel "pillars" and measured the amount the bacteria could bend them as a way of measuring the force of their pull.

They mostly saw a lot of short grabs. But one pull in a hundred started out at the same strength as these short pulls, then increased in increments about equal to the force of the original pull, as if the bacteria were calling in more individual pili to help out the first.

This eventually resulted in a pull that was up to ten times stronger than the initial short grab, and it could last for several hours.

Sexually-transmitted bug is the strongest organism [New Scientist]

I spoke with one of the researchers, Professor Vincent M. Rotello of the UMass Department of Chemistry, who foresees its use in medicine as a far more efficient bacteria test than today's "put it in a petri dish and wait" method. He also explained plans for a device usable in the fields of environmental protection or homeland security:

Our methodology should also be useful for environmental applications, including contamination of water and food through bioterrorism or less nefarious routes. We are thinking of a test-strip method, where you dip the strip into the solution to be analyzed, or alternatively rub against a surface, put it in the instrument and read out [the result].

Here's how it works: The researchers took a negatively charged polymer that fluoresces and combined it with gold nanoparticles, which suppressed the fluorescence. When the substance came in contact with bacteria, which are inherently negatively charged, the polymer was displaced from the gold nanoparticles, allowing it to fluoresce again. Photo by: Argonne National Laboratory.

Rapid and Efficient Identification of Bacteria Using Gold-Nanoparticle-Poly(para-phenyleneethynylene) Constructs. [Angewandte Chemie International Edition.]

According to BBC News:

They must transplant the synthetic genome into another cell so that it can use the existing machinery to "boot up" and start growing and reproducing. "It's installing the software - basically we have to boot up the genome, get it operating," said Dr [Hamilton] Smith, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1978. "We're simply re-writing the operating software for cells - we're not designing a genome from the bottom up - you can't drop a genome into a test tube and expect it to come to life," he added.

And leave it to MIT's awesome Drew Endy to give us the big picture:

Given the work already done in Japan, building genomes almost 10 million base-pairs long - I would be surprised if by 2012 it were not technically possible to routinely design and construct the genomes of any bacteria or single celled eukaryote, which also means that it will be possible to construct some mammalian chromosomes.

The synthetic genome is based on the bacteria Mycoplasma genitalium, which sounds sort of dirty, so researchers named its synthetic counterpart Mycoplasma JCVI-1.0.

Synthetic Life Advance Reported [BBC News]

A report from the medical center at UC San Francisco says:

The bacteria appear to be transmitted most easily through intimate sexual contact, but can spread through casual skin-to-skin contact or contact with contaminated surfaces. The scientists are concerned that it could also soon gain ground in the general population.

The new strain of bacteria is closely related to the MRSA bacteria that have spread beyond hospital borders in recent years and caused outbreaks of severe skin and other infections. But the newly discovered microbe is resistant to many more front-line antibiotics. Both strains are technically known as MRSA USA300.

Like its less antibiotic-resistant sibling, the new multi-drug resistant microbe spreads easily through skin-to-skin contact, invading skin and tissue beneath the skin. Both strains cause abscesses and ulcerations that can progress rapidly to life-threatening infections.

Sexually-active gay men vulnerable to new bacteria [UCSF]

Imagine vast bacteria farms, organically churning out nanotubes. It would be like a silkworm farm for nanopunks. Researcher Nosang Myung said:

We have shown that a jar with a bug in it can create potentially useful nanostructures.

But wait, isn't incorporating biology into our electronics the first step to sentient machines and the Cylon revolution? Let's not worry about that now, kids.

Nanotube-producing bacteria [via The Biotech Weblog]

The idea, first announced in 2005 but improved upon in newer work, is to take liquid waste, such as effluent from sewers, breweries or food processing plants, and feed it to soil- or wastewater-derived bacteria raised in reactors designed to foster their growth.

Gracious me! Effluent! They've got some kind of poet on the shit-eating bacteria beat over there in Murdoch country.

Actually, the process sounds like it might have legs. The Penn State engineers think they can eventually run their bacteria-breeding reactor on electricity generated by the bacteria-poo effluent interface. This is significant, as it would create a closed loop, with beautiful clean sweet-smelling hydrogen as the only byproduct. Not exactly an organic perpetual-motion machine, but close. It would provide a significant boost to more widespread use of fuel-cells.

The key input to get the coveted output, of course, is crap, of various flavors. And lord knows we're not going to be running out of that anytime soon.
AP Photo/Jay LaPrete

Garbage in, hydrogen out [FOXNews]