Science: bacterium that eats arsenic? Inconceivable!

Back in 2010, scientists were excited by what appeared to be the discovery of a bacterium, GFAJ-1, that not only lives in an environment rife with arsenic, but also eats that arsenic and uses it to survive instead of phosphorus. It would have been the first lifeform ever discovered that lives on anything outside of the six “building blocks” of life: oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorus and sulfur.

However, it was not meant to be. Two new studies have proven conclusively that GFAL-1 was still getting enough phosphorus to survive and had merely developed an immunity to arsenic. Alas, it is not the arsenic-drinking monster that we thought might have finally cured our Sicilian kidnapper problem.

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