Report: cells “from space” have unusual makeup

A line­age of odd mi­crobes that may have crashed in­to Earth aboard a me­te­or in 2001 seem to con­tain mo­le­cules not found in Earthly cells, two sci­en­tists are re­port­ing.Al­though many re­main skep­ti­cal over the re­mark­a­ble claim of mi­nus­cule ex­tra­ter­res­tri­al vis­i­tors, God­frey Lou­is, head of the phys­ics de­part­ment at Co­chin Uni­ver­s­ity of Sci­ence and Tech­nol­o­gy in In­dia, pre­sented the find­ings at a sci­en­tif­ic con­fer­ence in San Die­go on Aug. 12.
The meet­ing was or­gan­ized by SPIE, the In­terna­t­ional So­ci­e­ty for Op­ti­cal En­gi­neer­ing. The ac­ro­nym re­flects its form­er name as So­ci­e­ty of Photo-Op­ti­cal In­stru­menta­t­ion En­gi­neers.The mi­crobes give off un­sual sorts of flu­o­res­cence un­der spe­cif­ic light­ing con­di­tions, which fol­low pat­terns nev­er seen in nor­mal cells, ac­cord­ing to Lou­is and San­thosh Ku­mar of Ma­hat­ma Gan­dhi Uni­ver­s­ity in In­dia, co-authors of the re­port. The likely ex­plana­t­ion, they added, is that the par­t­i­cles con­tain mo­le­cules not found in Earthly or­gan­isms. Lou­is and Kumar pre­vi­ously re­ported that the odd part­i­cles con­tain no DNA, al­though they rep­li­cate abun­dantly in fe­ro­cious heat by spawn­ing new “cells” from with­in them­selves. It was these off­spring whose flu­o­res­cence prop­er­ties the pair tested.Mys­te­ri­ous, ti­ny red glob­ules fell to Earth in a red rain that pelted parts of south­ern In­dia spo­rad­ic­ally for about two months in 2001, caus­ing wide­spread puz­zle­ment. The event, how­ev­er, was the lat­est in a se­ries of re­ports of col­ored rains from var­i­ous places stretch­ing back cen­turies, some bet­ter doc­u­mented than oth­ers.Lou­is and Kumar say the orbs could be cells from space be­cause they have bi­o­log­i­cal char­ac­ter­is­tics but match no known life form. A space rock could have bro­ken up in the at­mos­phere and seeded clouds with these org­an­isms, the pair ar­gues, citing wit­ness reports of an air­burst just before the showers. Oth­er sci­en­tists have con­ced­ed the par­t­i­cles are mys­ti­fy­ing, but the claim of live cells from space is so bi­zarre that many are hold­ing back any as­sent.Some note that the haz­ards of jour­ney through space, in­clud­ing in­tense radia­t­ion and ex­tra­or­di­nary trav­el times, make the pos­si­bil­ity of bac­te­ri­al trans­fer among dif­fer­ent so­lar sys­tems un­like­ly.“Ex­changes of bac­te­ria be­tween plan­ets in dif­fer­ent so­lar sys­tems are only pos­si­ble dur­ing the birth clus­ter stage of the sys­tems,” when they’re sit­u­at­ed close to­geth­er in a star clus­ter, wrote sci­en­tists with NASA and oth­er in­sti­tu­tions in a re­port this month. Our own so­lar sys­tem is far from be­ing in such a stage. That pa­per has been ac­cept­ed for pub­lica­t­ion in the re­search jour­nal As­t­ro­phys­i­cal Jour­nal Let­ters.On the oth­er hand, re­search­ers with Kris­tian­stad Uni­ver­s­ity in Swe­den and oth­er in­sti­tu­tions re­ported on Sept. 8 that some ti­ny Earth an­i­mals called tardi­grades proved sur­pris­ingly re­sil­ient in out­er space. Dried-out tardi­grades lived for 10 days un­pro­tected in that en­vi­ron­ment, and went on to re­pro­duce, these sci­en­tists wrote in the Sept. 9 is­sue of the re­search jour­nal Cur­rent Bi­ol­o­gy.Lou­is and Ku­mar are per­sist­ing in their stud­ies; their ideas have gained sup­port from fig­ures such as Chan­dra Wick­ra­mas­inghe, di­rec­tor of the Car­diff Cen­tre for As­tro­bi­ol­o­gy at Car­diff Uni­ver­s­ity, U.K.In his pre­s­enta­t­ion, Lou­is said that “red cell” spawns un­der var­i­ous light­ing con­di­tions ex­h­bited prop­er­ties vi­o­lat­ing a sci­en­tif­ic prin­ci­ple known as Kasha’s Rule, found to have few ex­cep­tions else­where. The rule has to do with flu­o­res­cence, the phe­nom­e­non in which a sub­stance emits light of one col­or up­on stimula­t­ion by light from anoth­er col­or. Kasha’s rule holds that in gen­er­al, the col­or of the ar­riv­ing light and the emit­ted light are un­re­lat­ed. To the con­tra­ry, Lou­is found that in the red glob­ules’ “off­spring,” alone among cells on Earth, these col­ors are re­lat­ed by a dis­tinct pat­tern.“Hence the pres­ence of new kind of bio-mo­le­cules can be in­ferred,” Lou­is wrote in the pre­sented pa­per. “Or­gan­isms repli­cat­ing at 300 de­grees [Cel­si­us] and show­ing this kind of autoflu­o­res­cence are cur­rently un­known to ex­ist on earth yet sev­er­al thou­sand kilo­grams of these cells came down through the red rain.” The orig­i­nal par­ent cells are al­so un­der flu­o­res­cence test­ing and re­sults will be re­ported lat­er, Lou­is said

source: World Science