A team of scientists said yesterday that he had trained a bacteria to eat and grow from a diet of arsenic instead of phosphorus, one of the six elements considered essential for life, "which raises the possibility that there are bodies elsewhere in the universe or even here on Earth, using powers that we had not dared to dream. Microorganisms, obtained from the bottom of Mono Lake, California, and grown for months in a laboratory culture medium containing arsenic, phosphorus atoms gradually traded in their tiny bodies by arsenic atoms.
The scientists said these findings, if confirmed, will expand the notion of what life might be like. "There is a basic mystery when you look at life," said Dimitar Sasselov, an astronomer at the Center Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and director of an institute that studies the origins of life, which is not connected with work. Nature uses only a very restricted set of molecules and chemical reactions among the thousands that are available. This is the first sign that there might be other options. "
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