A “scary” superbacterium would survive an asteroid impact

Nuclear weapons are on the wallpaper again. If the big bombs really started going off, at least one living thing would survive.

In 1956, professor of microbiology Arthur Anderson irradiated a can of meat in a research lab in Oregon.

He was in his godfather. So much radiation had been bombarded into the corned beef that no known life form could survive it. Still, something bad happened when the meat spoiled despite the processing.

From a can of meat an unknown bacterium was found. It got the name Deinococcus radiodurans“terrible, radiation-resistant grain”.

A grain of terror has been studied a lot since then. It is the most resilient organism on our planet, sharing first place with other similar extremes.

These so-called extremophiles found in places where nothing else lives, from frozen mountaintops to dry deserts and hot springs at the bottom of the sea.

D. radiodurans can survive a radiation dose of up to 12,000 Gray. The amount is so absurd that it is difficult to relate it. A person dies from a few grays, and even the extremely tenacious little bear lizards can “only” withstand 4,000 grays.

You would hardly get that amount of radiation, even if you were standing under an exploding nuclear bomb or eating nuclear waste.

For hard surfaces the little guy is given quite dangerous tasks in the laboratory.

Now PNAS Nexus -science publication measured whether a bacterium could survive an asteroid collision. Just already.

The researchers placed bacteria in a thin film between two steel plates and shot the plates with lating, which flattened the bubbles to a pressure of up to three gigapascals.

That’s 30,000 kilograms per square centimeter. It is roughly the equivalent of a tank crushing the tip of a high-heeled shoe.

A significant part of the bugs survived, which surprised even the researchers. The bacterium has a very dense cell wall and repairs damage to its DNA very efficiently. So it can withstand all kinds of punishment.

If a nuclear war or an asteroid ever destroys the Earth, it could D. radiodurans fly from here to Mars on a detached rock mass. Would it evolve into an alien over time?

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