CH391L/S12/RecentNews

January 2012

• Study Fails to Confirm Existence of Arsenic-Based Life - Scientific American: Rosie Redfield of the University of British Columbia has completed her attempts to replicate the findings of Felicia Wolfe-Simon, namely that the GFAJ-1 bacterium could utilize arsenic in its DNA backbone in the place of phosphorous. UPDATE: Redfield Lab manuscript available on arXiv

• Carl Zimmer reports on new work from Richard Lenski's lab demonstrating that bacteriophage lambda can evolve novel pathways of infection in a surprisingly short time PMID: 22282803. This work also features work from a certain synthetic biology instructor, Dr. Jeffrey E. Barrick.

• Arsenic sensing "biopixel" recently published in Nature. pmid: 22178928