NASA-funded research at MonLake demonstrates the ability of life to thrive even in abundant arsenic, which, in the bacterium GFAJ-1, incredibly replaces phosphorus as the basic building block of life. Arsenic was previously considered a poison to life because, with properties very similar to phosphorus, it interacts destructively with it. However, subsequent independent studies published in 2012 found no detectable arsenate in GFAJ-1’s DNA, refuting this claim and demonstrating that GFAJ-1 is simply a phosphate-dependent organism resistant to arsenate.
