Is New Life Form Found Under Antarctic Ice?

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Two months back, we commented on a successful mission by Russians to collect water from a lake long buried under Antarctic ice -

Expect Some Really Amazing Metagenome Data from Russia

Now it seems like they have indeed found a new kind of bacterial life -

An enormous lake that has lain buried under Antarctic ice for millions of years is home to a new kind of bacterial life, Russian scientists claim.

The researchers found evidence for the unidentified organism in water samples brought up from Lake Vostok, the largest subglacial lake on the Antarctic continent.

The Russian team found seven samples of the mystery species in water that had frozen on a drill head used to reach the lake that lies beneath an ice sheet more than two miles (3.5km) thick.

The scientists extracted strands of DNA from the organism, but said the genetic code was never more than an 86% match with any of the species listed in global databanks. Sergey Bulat, a researcher on the team at the Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute, said that anything less than a 90% match usually indicated that the organism was unknown.

“We call it unidentified and ‘unclassified’ life,” Bulat told the state news agency, RIA Novosti. “If it were found on Mars, people would call it Martian DNA. But this is DNA from Earth,” he added.

Would our readers from St. Petersburg shed any more light on the discovery?

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Anton Korobeynikov

March 9, 2013 at 12:02 am

The original RIA Novosti (=RIA News) article is here: http://ria.ru/science/20130307/926327944.html and it seem to contain slightly more information.

Let me briefly translate some points out of it:

1. Total 150 ml of water samples was obtained
2. It was found that there were approx. 160 cells per ml. So, the abundance is quite low
3. The samples were heavily contaminated with human cells and bacteria from drilling reagents
4. After cleaning out the contaminations only 3 different kinds of bacteria remained:
– One still classified as contamination (it was able to metabolize kerosene)
– Second one being Sporosarcina
– And the third is some unknown one
5. The third type of bacteria was analyzed via rRNA database and was classified to OD1 phylum. However, no significant match to any known bacteria out of this phylum was found.

In May there will be other samples of water, so, hopefully new stuff will be found as well.

admin

March 9, 2013 at 12:56 am

Thanks Anton. Who is doing bioinformatics? I thought it would be you guys after seeing St. Petersburg in the news.

March 9, 2013 at 1:02 am

Few more snippets (after google translate+Anton’s correction) -

He recalled that Lake Vostok was covered with ice about 14-15 million years old and has been isolated from the surface environment and biota. “Environment there is very unfavorable, with time growing oxygen content, no nutrients. Bacteria undoubtedly existed in the lake before it was covered with ice. We believe that evolution occurred 15 million years enough to form a new species or genus “- said Bulat.

One method – the classification using the ribosomal database (Ribosomal Database) – refers to the section OD1, that is, a class of bacteria, which is still very poorly understood. “But when I took all the known members of this OD1 from GeneBank, to prove similarity, it was not possible. That is – not OD1″, – said Bulat.

and for bioinformaticians -

According to him, at this stage, the scientists left to hold another kind of study – full-length analysis of the gene. Until now, scientists have studied fragments of 500-700 bp in length – “building blocks of DNA” – despite the fact that one gene of approximately 1.5 kilobases. “If the test detects full-size genes, then we can say that the DNA is not degraded, and most of all, they live there,” – said the scientist.

March 9, 2013 at 9:32 am

No, it wasn’t us. It seems there is a laboratory in PNPI (Bulat’s Laboratory) which did long-running Vostok-related research. Some more information here: http://biod.pnpi.spb.ru/~bulat/pages_en/Bulat_eng-2.html But it seems it’s outdated. I do not know all the details, but there were rumors that there is 454 GS Junior somewhere in Gatchina (where PNPI is located). The lengths of the sequences kinda confirms this Note that there are several groups in St. Petersburg who can do bioinformatics stuff. After all Algorithm Biology Lab in SPbAU is a dry lab

PS: Please correct the translation. In “Wednesday there is very unfavorable” should be “Environment there is very unfavorable”. There are several possible translations for Russian word “среда” and google translate was not able to select the proper one.

Istvan Albert

March 11, 2013 at 8:49 am

Wouldn’t any metagenomic sample extracted from any reasonably diverse environment contain a previously unknown bacteria?

(also your commenting system seems to have eaten one of my comments … perhaps because I wasn’t overly optimistic about the qualities of most free software and your free software did not like that)

March 11, 2013 at 10:03 am

Oh well -

“No mystery life found in Antarctic lake, Russian scientists admit”

http://www.foxnews.com/science/2013/03/11/russia-microbe-water-samples-antarctic-lake-vostok/#ixzz2NFeeR5a9

It is tragic, when I have to post Fox news link to debunk a news release by ‘scientists’.

March 11, 2013 at 10:07 am

“also your commenting system seems to have eaten one of my comments … perhaps because I wasn’t overly optimistic about the qualities of most free software and your free software did not like that”

I am sorry to hear that. I get really pissed, when I write a long comment in some blog that goes away after I press enter. Could you please recommend a comment system? I did not spend much time thinking about those issues during design phase, because I thought I could use the forum to keep all comments. Then some readers at seqanswers said that they wanted wordpress comment section opened instead of the forum, and that got me into wordpress spam world of hell !!