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Old 12-03-2010, 09:11 AM   #12
Flint
Snowflake
 
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Dystopia
Posts: 13,136
Interesting information heard on NPR this morning:

This wasn't an accidental discovery, she was looking for it. Felisa Wolfe Simon was fascinated by animals that make chemical substitutions (such as crustaceans substituting copper for iron to carry the oxygen in their bloodstream) and so she went to an arsenic-rich environment hoping to find this.

The arsenic doesn't completely replace all the phosphorus in the DNA of these bacteria. But I guess you could call it a proof of concept.
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