Felisa Wolfe-Simon
Felisa Wolfe-Simon is a geomicrobiologist . She is a NASA Astrobiology Research Fellow in residence at the US Geological Survey and a member of the NASA Astrobiology Institute .
Life
Wolfe-Simon studied at Oberlin College . In 2006 she received a National Science Foundation post-doctoral fellowship to support her work at Harvard and Arizona State University . In 2010 she was honored with the United States National Academy of Sciences' Kavli Fellowship . Her research is supported by the NASA Exobiology / Evolutionary Biology program. She was the head of a team that discovered an extremophilic bacterium ( GFAJ-1 ). Wolfe-Simon and her team published a report in December 2010 in which they named this bacterium as the first known organism to use arsenic as part of its DNA . Several other scientists around the world have expressed skepticism about this conclusion and have made significant criticisms of the methodology used.
A review in 2012 showed that arsenic has no part in the genetic information of the bacterial strain and that the original thesis must therefore be rejected.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Wissenschaft-Online from December 7, 2010: - The arsenic snap shot backfires
- ↑ Astrobiology online December 2, 2010: Thriving on Arsenic
- ↑ Nature News of December 2, 2010: Arsenic-eating microbe may redefine chemistry of life
- ↑ Marshall Louis Reaves, Sunita Sinha et al: Absence of detectable arsenate in DNA from arsenate-grown GFAJ-1 cells. (PDF; 3.3 MB), preprint, as of April 19, 2012
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Wolfe-Simon, Felisa |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American geomicrobiologist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 20th century |