Bacteria that can survive anywhere...

sorgoth

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http://www.livescience.com/animalworld/050207_extremophiles.html

A pretty interesting article. Most of you probably already know about the extremophiles, but the resistance that some have and the extent to which it would be possible for things like this to live on other planets is pretty exciting.

One species of bacteria, Deinococcus radiodurans, can withstand a 15,000 gray dose of radiation – 10 grays would kill a human and it takes over 1,000 grays to kill a cockroach.
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After the nuclear war, we know who's gonna rule the world.
 
neutrino_cannon said:
Then there's that one archaean that can actually reproduce in an autoclave.
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Thermus aquaticus. Loves 120C! fortunately it wont grow at all on your 37C petri dish.
 
We really do have to stop thinking of 'bacteria' as being a single category of living thing; most of the living things on this planet are bacteria, and in terms of diversity the two least alike organisms (genetically) on this planet are two bacteria.

They are perfect little machines. I so loved doing bacto' at uni, and still find them fascinating.

Athon
 
And who wants to bet there ain't people trying to splice those heat shock genes into a toxic bacterium right now?
 
Soapy Sam said:
And who wants to bet there ain't people trying to splice those heat shock genes into a toxic bacterium right now?
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That could pose a very serious problem.
Still some scientists are probably risking to try it.

For instance Russian microbiologists specialising in biological weapons have tried to develop a perfect killer virus by genetically combining the most deadly part of Ebola zaire with the most infectious part of Variola. They have also developed a strain of airborne Yersinia pestis with extreme infectivity which is also genetically engineered to be multi-drug resistant. It's amazing what bio-terrorists can do if they put their minds to it.

This is what I mean by "bacteria rule the world" or rather "microbes rule the world".
 
jambo372 said:
That could pose a very serious problem.
Still some scientists are probably risking to try it.

For instance Russian microbiologists specialising in biological weapons have tried to develop a perfect killer virus by genetically combining the most deadly part of Ebola zaire with the most infectious part of Variola. They have also developed a strain of airborne Yersinia pestis with extreme infectivity which is also genetically engineered to be multi-drug resistant. It's amazing what bio-terrorists can do if they put their minds to it.

This is what I mean by "bacteria rule the world" or rather "microbes rule the world".
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I don't doubt there are possibilities for such bioweapons but I must add a piece of info on that plague claim.

Yersinia pestis already has an airborne form, pneumonic plague. There is an outbreak ongoing in the Congo as we speak. And a 5 drug antibiotic resistant strain of plague turned up on it's own at least a decade ago. Natural mechanism of gene transfer was the presumed culprit, not lab intervention.

As to the ebola-variola, how were these guys planning to protect themselves? And somehow I wonder why they wouldn't be pursuing a combo of the Reston virus with ebola since they are more closely related?
 
skeptigirl said:
I don't doubt there are possibilities for such bioweapons but I must add a piece of info on that plague claim.

Yersinia pestis already has an airborne form, pneumonic plague. There is an outbreak ongoing in the Congo as we speak. And a 5 drug antibiotic resistant strain of plague turned up on it's own at least a decade ago. Natural mechanism of gene transfer was the presumed culprit, not lab intervention.

As to the ebola-variola, how were these guys planning to protect themselves? And somehow I wonder why they wouldn't be pursuing a combo of the Reston virus with ebola since they are more closely related?
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Yes, Y pestis already has an airborne form but from what I remember they had managed to make it even more infectious than it already was. I do remember reading about that naturally occuring multi-resistant plague strain, however if I remember correctly, the patients still responded to certain drugs, although not to the 3 first line treatments. Scientists have managed to make strans resistant to every drug.

I don't know why they would want to combine Ebola zaire with Ebola reston. Ebola reston is a disease of monkeys not thought to be harmful to people. they combined smallpox with Ebola because Ebola is lethal and smallpox is extremely infectious and quite lethal.
 
Oh goody.

I read Ken Alikbek's book on the old Soviet germ warfare project. Interesting stuff, including old Boris Yeltsin's part in hushing up the Anthrax release in the late 80s.

Jambo- you're a much more interesting fellow when you stay off the spooks.
 
My guess is that extremophiles are so adapted to their chosen environement, most of their genetic material would be useless to something designed to infect humans. You can rarely have it both ways, and any drug resistance or other adaptation that an organism has is probably costing it metabolically.
 
neutrino_cannon said:
My guess is that extremophiles are so adapted to their chosen environement, most of their genetic material would be useless to something designed to infect humans. You can rarely have it both ways, and any drug resistance or other adaptation that an organism has is probably costing it metabolically.
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You are probably right. What if it worked the other way ?
Rather than heat resistance being spread to pathogens from Deinococcus, virulence genes encoding toxins etc went from pathogens to Deinococcus.

Speaking of germ warfare, I wonder what would happen if a new pandemic flu strain capable of global spread was genetically combined with Ebola or Marburg. Many of the labs investing in these weapons aren't secure either - the cases of Anthrax in the US were caused by a strain specially developed in US labs, Islamic terrorists didn't make it themselves, they stole it. Either this or the terrorists actually worked in the lab or had someone else working there smuggle it out and give it to them.
 
Seeing as most extremophiles like to live in, well, extreme conditions, and "extreme" is an anthropocentric term that means "where nobody lives because it's got too much heat/pressure/cold/toxicity", I wouldn't be that concerned about nasty bugs living where I wouldn't be going anyway. Besides, if they're designed to live inside a volcano, they'll have more than a little trouble processing my inards.

It would be difficult fun trying to splice together RNA viruses that use frame-shifting, even if they use the same type of RNA encoding.



Edit:


http://www.news-medical.net/?id=3864

All of the anthrax spores in the mail were found to be of an identical strain. This strain is one that the U.S. military used for study at USAMRIID and distributed to other government and university labs as well as to other governments including United Kingdom. The FBI claims that they are concentrating on a domestic terrorist. They now believe that the anthrax attack was not related to the September 11th, 2001 attacks.
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Bold mine.
 
jambo372 said:
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I don't know why they would want to combine Ebola zaire with Ebola reston. Ebola reston is a disease of monkeys not thought to be harmful to people. they combined smallpox with Ebola because Ebola is lethal and smallpox is extremely infectious and quite lethal.
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Reston is airborne and quite infectious, and more easily combined with ebola I would assume. IE they would make an airborne ebola.
 
jambo372 said:
....
Speaking of germ warfare, I wonder what would happen if a new pandemic flu strain capable of global spread was genetically combined with Ebola or Marburg. ......
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Having a fun time thinking up this stuff are we, jambo?
 
skeptigirl said:
Having a fun time thinking up this stuff are we, jambo?
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No, but it might be a useful weapon to have on hand when I begin my attempts at world domination.:big:
As well as a few nuclear bombs.

I know what you mean about combining the Reston strain of Ebola with the Zaire strain, I had previously assumed that Ebola reston spread the same way as the Zaire and Sudan strains. Still, Variola would add a virulence boost of it's own to Ebola as well as making it airborne, Reston would just make it airborne. The one problem I can see with this as a bio-weapon is that Smallpox vaccination & Cidofovir may give some degree of protection.

I must have a really evil mind to think this all up.
 
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