Daily Archives: December 7, 2005

Medical Fab, Part 2

Last January it was reported that a group of researchers in the U.K. was busy trying to beat competitors in Japan and the United States in the “printing” of body tissue.

This week Wired reported on progress in the U.S.

Led by University of Missouri-Columbia biological physics professor Gabor Forgacs and aided by a $5 million National Science Foundation grant, researchers at three universities have developed bio-ink and bio-paper that could make so-called organ printing a reality.

So far, they’ve made tubes similar to human blood vessels and sheets of heart muscle cells, printed in three dimensions on a special printer.

There is some hesitation from the scientists involved to speculate how far this technology could go. But one participate offered this:

“I think this is going to be a biggie,” said Glenn D. Prestwich, the University of Utah professor who developed the bio-paper. “A lot of things are going to be a pain in the butt to print, but I think we can do livers and kidneys as well.”

Read the whole thing.

Extreme Bugs

Cool. Er, rather, downright cold, actually:

Methane-producing microbes have been discovered in two extreme environments on Earth – buried under kilometres of ice in Greenland and living in hot, dry desert soil. The findings lend weight to the idea that similar organisms may have lived on Mars.

Live microbes making methane were found in a glacial ice core sample retrieved from three kilometres under Greenland by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, US. It is the first time such archaea have been found at that depth, says Buford Price, one of the research team…

Scientists had already noticed that the concentrations of methane in the lowest 90 metres of the ice core was 10 times as high as that at other depths. Now the Berkeley scientists have found the likely cause – correspondingly higher levels of microbes that produce methane, known as methanogens.

These robust microbes in Greenland might tell us something about the unaccounted-for concentrations of methane found in the Martian atmosphere. There is no way for methane to persist in the atmosphere of Mars unless it is somehow being renewed. (And volcanoes have already been ruled out as a source.) Could hardy Martian microbes be lacing the atmosphere with methane the same way these microbes are stinking up the deep ice in Greenland?

Maybe.

And who knows? Maybe the two varieties of microbe are cousins.