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Is This New Study the Nail in the Coffin of "Arsenic Life"?

A Canadian researcher says she has debunked controversial claims that a microbe found in California's Mono Lake can replace the phosphorus in its DNA with arsenic Microbiologist Rosie Redfield, at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, spent several months trying to reproduce the results of an experiment conducted by a team led by Felisa Wolfe-Simon (see the feature "Scientist in a Strange Land" I wrote for PopSci in October.) In the original paper, published in the online edition of the journal Science in December 2010, Wolfe-Simon and her team suggested that a bacterium called GFAJ-1 could substitute arsenic, poisonous for most life forms, for phosphorus, considered an essential element for all living cells. The finding, which was extensively promoted by NASA (whose Astrobiology Institute funded the research), jolted the scientific community, since it contradicted long-accepted rules of biochemistry. Within days of the announcement researchers began to question Wolfe-Simon's methodology and conclusions. Bypassing peer-reviewed periodicals, many voiced their criticisms directly on blogs and Twitter. "When the manuscript is reviewed I'll make myself available for comment," says Oremfield, "if I'm not too busy eating crow."Among the most vociferous critics was Redfield, whose blog, RRResearch, became a clearinghouse for challenges to the paper. After Wolfe-Simon's team sent GFAJ-1 samples to Redfield, Redfield put the results to the test, documenting her progress in an open online notebook to advance what she calls "the cause of open science." Redfield now says her failure to reproduce Wolfe-Simon's results is a "clear refutation" of key findings from the paper. Thus far, Wolfe-Simon is not retreating from her team's conclusions. "We do not fully understand the key details of the website experiments and conditions," Wolfe-Simon wrote in an e-mail to Nature. "So we hope to see this work published in a peer-reviewed journal, as this is how science best proceeds." The paper's principal investigator, Ron...

Is This New Study the Nail in the Coffin of "Arsenic Life"?

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