I think I discussed this here before but I couldn't locate it on Habitablezone.com
after a web search.
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Cassini radar imaging shows Titan to contain lakes of liquid methane:
January 03, 2007
Moon River: Titan's Polar Surface Dotted with Lakes of Methane.
By David Biello
"A missing methane sea on Titan has been replaced by a variety of
lakes, according to new radar images."
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=E9AEDE6E-E7F2-99DF-38964C1303600942
It had been argued that life could not survive on Titan even if liquid
water existed since biological chemical reactions would not persist at
the cryogenic temperatures of Titan, down to -179 degrees C.
However, some startling research recently showed microbes metabolizing
down to -196 derees C:
1.08.2006 - Biologie
Colwellia ist echt cool
Die Mikrobe betreibt noch bei minus 200 Grad Celsius Stoffwechsel.
http://www.wissenschaft.de/wissen/news/268486
Here's the Babelfish translation:
__________________________________________________________
11.08.2006 - Biology
Colwellia is genuinely cool.
The microbe still operates with minus 200 degrees Celsius metabolism.
A bacterium named Colwellia gives still weak signs of life of itself at
temperatures of minus two hundred degrees Celsius. If this is made
possible by special antifreeze and enzymes, which produce the microbes
and which they protect against frost damages, researchers of the
university of Washington pointed to Seattle. This discovery does not
only show, which extreme minus degrees can bear terrestrial organisms,
they throw also a completely new light on the possibility of
extraterrestial life on icy heavenly bodies.
>From a row types of bacteria it is well-known that they get along
problem-
free with temperatures of minus twenty degrees Celsius. They
live in the ice in tiny liquid vesicles, which are hardly larger than
them. The bacteria separate into these vesicles substances, which have
similarity with Xanthan. In addition, this substance is used in the
foodstuffs industry as thickener, can prevent the formation from ice
crystals to a temperature of minus two hundred degrees.
So far the scientists had assumed below a temperature of minus twenty
degrees Celsius no more metabolism is possible. But the results with
Colwellia push this border now far to the rear. So a group of
researchers could show around Karen boy of the university of Washington
for example that the microbes themselves form proteins at the
temperature of liquid nitrogen still. In addition the biologists
supplied some Colwellia cultures with the radioactively marked protein
component Leucin and examined afterwards whether in the bacteria
proteins with these marked components were. They came to the amazing
result that the bacteria insert small quantities of Leucin actually
still with minus 196 degrees Celsius into proteins.
A second researcher team of the university in Seattle examined those
scarcely 5,000 genes of the ice bacteria, in order to come the special
substances on the trace, which lend its strength to the microbes
against cold weather. The scientists encountered a whole set of
hereditary property goods, on which information for the education was
deposited by extremely effective insulation for cold proteins, explain
Jody Deming, chief of the working group.
These results demonstrated not only the extreme adaptability of
terrestrial organisms, but let also the existence of extraterrestial
life appear very many more probable than so far meant. The frozen
stores of water Mars come now likewise in principle as habitat for
micro organisms into question like the ice tank of the Jupitermonds
Europe.
New Scientist, 12 August, S. 35
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Jmilsom, on the Uplink.space.com site also quoted from the New
Scientist article:
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Re: Psychrophiles - New possibilities for life in Solar Syst [re:
MeteorWayne]
That's absolutely fascinating.
This finding really is amazing and controversial. It's almost like the
martian meteorite or cold fusion announcements. If it proves true, it
really is quite a revolutionary finding about the tenacity of life.
Here is more background to the finding and process by which Colwellia
functions at very cold temperatures.
-----As the weather gets colder, Colwellia starts oozing a gloopy
concoction called exopolymer. This mixture of stringy, starch-like
molecules absorbs water and forms gels inside the ice veins. As
temperatures drop, expanding ice crystals suck water back out of the
gel, leaving the remaining water molecules isolated from one another.
"These pockets of water molecules are so small that ice nuclei can't
grow," says Christopher Krembs, a biological oceanographer at the
University of Washington. The result is a glassy state that is still
essentially liquid but resists freezing. No one knows how powerful the
exopolymer's effect is, but xanthan gum, a similar substance used in
the food industry, can prevent ice crystallisation at -200°C. Swaddled
in exopolymer, Colwellia is shielded from encroaching ice crystals that
would damage it, and from concentrated salts that would dehydrate it.
Colwellia's protective coating certainly does the trick. At -7°C the
bacterium zips around as quickly as our gut bacterium Escherichia coli
swims at body temperature. At -14°C it can still grow and divide, and
in sea ice at -20°C it continues respiring (Applied Environmental
Microbiology, vol 70, p550).
Last year Deming's [Jody Deming is the marine microbiologist at the
University of Washington that led the Colwellia genome sequencing team]
colleague Karen Junge brought Colwellia into the lab to test its cold
tolerance more precisely. To get a measure of its metabolic rate, she
incubated it at various temperature's between 13°C and -20°C to see
how quickly it incorporated a radioactively labelled amino acid,
leucine, into newly manufactured protein. As a control, she also
incubated Colwellia at -80°C. At that temperature even Colwellia, she
assumed, would be dormant or probably dead.
She was wrong, Colwellia built radioactive leucine into new protein at
all temperatures including -80°C. So Junge tried harsher conditions.
She plunged a tube of bacteria into liquid nitrogen, -196°C, and left
it for 24-hours. When she read the results she could hardly believe it.
Colwellia had again incorporated a small amount of the leucine into
protein.-----
-Source: Fox, Douglas "Sub-Zero Survivors," in New Scientist, Vol 191,
no. 2564, 12 August 2006, p36.
The article then explains how over many months she tried the experiment
again and again, believeing there must be a simple explanation, but
always got the same result. They also ran an experiment to rule out
purely chemcial processes, and concluded it must be biological. Her
work is published in the journal Cryobiology Vol 52, p417.
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Here's the abstract to the original journal paper:
Cryobiology. 2006 Apr 26;: 16647051 [Pubmed] [Scholar]
Bacterial incorporation of leucine into protein down to -20 degrees C
with evidence for potential activity in sub-eutectic saline ice
formations.
Karen Junge , Hajo Eicken , Brian D Swanson , Jody W Deming
"Direct evidence for metabolism in a variety of frozen environments has
pushed temperature limits for bacterial activity to increasingly lower
temperatures, so far to -20 degrees C. To date, the metabolic
activities of marine psychrophilic bacteria, important components of
sea-ice communities, have not been studied in laboratory culture, not
in ice and not below -12 degrees C. We measured [(3)H]-leucine
incorporation into macromolecules (further fractionated biochemically)
by the marine psychrophilic bacterium Colwellia psychrerythraea strain
34H over a range of anticipated activity-permissive temperatures, from
+13 to -20 degrees C, including expected negative controls at -80 and
-196 degrees C. For incubation temperatures below -1 degrees C, the
cell suspensions [all in artificial seawater (ASW)] were first
quick-frozen in liquid nitrogen. We also examined the effect of added
extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) on [(3)H]-leucine
incorporation. Results showed that live cells of strain 34H
incorporated substantial amounts of [(3)H]-leucine into
TCA-precipitable material (primarily protein) down to -20 degrees C. At
temperatures from -1 to -20 degrees C, rates were enhanced by EPS. No
activity was detected in the killed controls for strain 34H (or in
Escherichia coli controls), which included TCA-killed, heat-killed, and
sodium azide- and chloramphenicol-treated samples. Surprisingly,
evidence for low but significant rates of intracellular incorporation
of [3H]-leucine into protein was observed for both ASW-only and
EPS-amended (and live only) samples incubated at -80 and -196 degrees
C. Mechanisms that could explain the latter results require further
study, but the process of vitrification promoted by rapid freezing and
the presence of salts and organic polymers may be relevant. Overall,
distinguishing between intracellular and extracellular aspects of
bacterial activity appears important to understanding behavior at
sub-freezing temperatures."
http://lib.bioinfo.pl/pmid:16647051
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Bob Clark
Could microbes survive in the cryogenic temperatures of Titan?
