According to James Elser, professor at Arizona State University, the one thing he could always count on telling his students was that “Every living thing uses phosphorus to build its DNA.” After Thurday’s announcement by NASA astrobiologist Felisa Wolfe-Simon, he will probably be rewriting his lectures.

At a NASA press conference at 1:00 pm, December 2, 2010, Dr. Wolfe-Simon described work by her team to identify organisms that could make interesting elemental substitutions in biomolecules. Specifically the team looked at Mono Lake, located in California, USA in the Eastern Sierra. Mono Lake is representative of an extreme environment because it registers a pH of 10, is three times more salty than sea water, and contains a great deal of arsenic (average = 200µM), a normally toxic element.

Continue reading “Six Required Elements for Life: C, N, O, S, H, and P. Well, maybe not P.”