[ExI] Ancient & Viable

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Wed, Jul 29, 2020 at 2:13 AM SR Ballard via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> TITLE:  Deep sea microbes dormant for 100 million years are hungry and
> ready to multiply
>
> https://phys.org/news/2020-07-deep-sea-microbes-dormant-million.html
>
>
> Basically, the title says it all. Pretty cool, huh?
>
>
### But very surprising, to the point of suggesting other interpretations.
RNA hydrolyses over short spans of time. The half-life of cytosine is
17,000 years. It is just not possible for an organism at non-cryogenic
temperature to maintain the integrity of its RNA over geological timespans
without metabolism needed to repair. The microbes must have been running at
least DNA repair and some RNA and protein synthesis, if not cell division,
to maintain their viability. Maybe there are burrowing animals that mix the
sediments, or there is enough nutrient and oxygen diffusion to keep them
alive.

Definitely not 100 million year old cells lying dormant and then just
springing back to life.

Rafal
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20200811/7a792357/attachment.htm>