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RE: Bugs In the News: Bacteria boozing it up in NASA clean rooms
I really find this post interesting @effofex. I think the science community should be more proactive now with modifications that some organisms are experiencing in other for them to survive. Image those bugs eating alcohol and detergent? that really sounds crazy. We must be careful as you rightly put not to introduce some of these organisms to other planets (NASA ; warning). Invasive species could spell more doom than we could ever imagine!!!
Could you expand upon this?
Yeah, I was talking about the change in feeding habit of organisms. How do they cope with their nutrition requirement been modified to suit their new environment and yet survive. For instance how could those bugs survive on detergent and alcohol. Is it not weird?.
A good rule of thumb is that if there's a way to shuffle electrons on carbon, some bug somewhere is doing it. Unlike us, a lot of bugs have what we call 'phenotypic plasticity', which is a fancy way of saying that they can change around their metabolism (and other stuff) by activating alternate (usually) genetic pathways to adapt to their environment. It's like if we could start digesting grass, but only if we were starving in the first place.
Lol