Dec. 2, 2010: NASA-supported researchers announced that they had discovered the first known microorganism on Earth able to thrive and reproduce using the toxic chemical arsenic. The microorganism, which lives in 740,000 year old California's Mono Lake, substitutes arsenic for phosphorus in the backbone of its DNA and other cellular components.
"The definition of life has just expanded," said Ed Weiler, NASA's associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at the agency's Headquarters in Washington. "As we pursue our efforts to seek signs of life in the solar system, we have to think more broadly, more diversely and consider life as we do not know it."
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