Last week I wrote an article ("An Unusual Bacteria") about a potentially ground breaking finding that a bacterium had been found to be using arsenic in its DNA structure. A few days ago I came across an article in Scientific American about a follow up study that was performed.
The follow up study grew the bacteria , GFAJ-1, in arsenic and very little phosphorus, like the methods used in the original paper. The DNA of the grown bacteria was then purified and sent off for analysis using a caesium chloride gradient and then a mass spectrometer. The results showed that no arsenic was found in the DNA.
However, these results have yet to be published in a peer-reviewed scientific paper, so this new finding must be taken with a grain of salt. The author of the original paper about GFAJ-1, Felisa Wolfe-Simon, countered that perhaps the caesium chloride gradient made any arsenic-containing DNA too fragile, and broke apart, and not appearing in a significant way in the results. Also, it could be argued that the follow up study did not starve the bacteria of enough phosphorus so that it would start using arsenic.
The text of the original Science article misrepresents the data (Supplementary Table 1, for example) as does the authors’ Response to the Technical Comments. The authors have committed misconduct both in the original publication and in their persistence in their pseudoscience after it has been demonstrated incontrovertibly that they provide no evidence for their claims.
ReplyDeleteWhat do you mean by the authors committed misconduct? How so?
ReplyDelete