1 reply to this topic

[Voku_Hila]

http://siberiantimes...-life-bacteria/

[resveratrol_guy]

There is a new video interview with discoverer Anatoli Brouchkov. While the interviewer missed a great opportunity to ask many obvious questions, one new claim to come to light is that this bacterium can survive immersion in vodka, which is upwards of 37% alcohol by volume; it appears to consume the alcohol. I would imagine there's something to this, as such a claim would be easily refuted if not.

 

niner pointed out back in 2012 that the "life extension" properties in mice really came down to premature death for the controls and normal lifespan for the experimentals. However, if both groups suffered equally bad husbandry, then we may still have something here.

 

From an evolutionary standpoint, extending the life of the host makes intuitive sense for symbiotic bacteria. After all, they don't want their own colony to die. That said, it's not at all clear to me why Brouchkov assumed that injection as opposed to ingestion was the way to go; perhaps this is really an ancient gut bacterium.

 

He speculates that it may provide host DNA repair services. Obviously this bacterium would have no way to identify errors, but it might accomplish this task through HDAC inhibition or other common mammalian repair pathways. He says that the genome has been sequenced, but not surprisingly, no one seems to understand it. Perhaps related to this is the observation that the bacterium can remain in recoverable biostasis for millions of years within the permafrost.

 

I'll give him this much: he doesn't come across as a hypester.

 

One other thing... if the biostasis and extremophile claims hold up, then it could be that bacillus F is the strongest piece of circumstantial evidence for panspermia ever discovered. That alone is worth some research dollars.

Edited by resveratrol_guy, 21 December 2015 - 10:11 PM.