Back in December 2010, I wrote about Terrestrial Alien Life- referring to a study that claimed a specific microbe could replace phosphorous with arsenic. When we think of what is essential to life, most lay people don’t think of phosphorous, but it is one of the major chemical building blocks.
As an update to that post, two new studies have now been released that dispute the original claims. They do believe the microbe is significant for it’s ability to grow using very little phosphorous and survive in an arsenic rich environment, but it does not re-write the playbook on life.