Credit: Nigel Buchanan
TWENTY-TWO YEARS AGO, on 26 April 1986, reactor No 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, in Ukraine, blew apart, spewing radioactive dust and debris far and wide.
Ever since, a 30 km 'exclusion zone' has existed around the contaminated site, accessible to those with special clearance only. It's quite easy, then, to conjure an apocalyptic vision of the area; to imagine an eerily deserted wasteland, utterly devoid of life.
But the truth is quite the opposite. The exclusion zone is teeming with wildlife of all shapes and sizes, flourishing unhindered by human interference and seemingly unfazed by the ever-present radiation. Most remarkable, however, is not the life buzzing around the site, but what's blooming inside the perilous depths of the reactor.
Sitting at the centre of the exclusion zone, the damaged reactor unit is encased in a steel and cement sarcophagus. It's a deathly tomb that plays host to about 200 tonnes of melted radioactive fuel, and is swarming with radioactive dust.
But it's also the abode of some very hardy fungi which researchers believe aren't just tolerating the severe radiation, but actually harnessing its energy to thrive.
"Our findings suggest that [the fungi] can capture the energy from radiation and transform it into other forms of energy that can be used for growth," said microbiologist Arturo Casadevall from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University in New York, USA.
Fungi are weird, yes. They chow down on everything from decaying plant matter to the more exotic fare of asbestos and jet fuel. But being able to produce their own energy, independent of an actual food source, and use dangerous ionising radiation to boot? That's very new and very exciting, Casadevall says.
In 1999, a robot sent to map the inside of the reactor returned with samples of a particularly black fungi, indicating an abundance of the biological pigment melanin, which also colours your skin.
Though melanin is typically associated with 'protective' properties – absorbing and safely transforming different electromagnetic wavelengths, such as DNA-damaging ultraviolet light – the researchers had an inkling that a more extraordinary phenomenon was allowing the fungi to prosper; something still involving the combination of melanin and radiation, but beyond the bounds of radioactive protection.
After all, even without melanin, many fungi are intrinsically radiation-resistant.
Melanin in humans absorbs UV
Melanin in humans absorbs UV radiation so that it doesn't damage our cells. I don't think there's been any hint of that energy being put to any useful purpose.
The energy will have to go somewhere though, my guess would be that it's released as heat.
LOVECRAFT
Fungi from yuggoth
life
is this a newly evolved life form, or is it a fungi that existed in the reactor prior to the accident?
I bet those mushrooms will
I bet those mushrooms will get you really high.
This effect may be more widespread than just fungi.
You may want to take a look at this recent announcement of some research being conducted at Stamford.
http://med.stanford.edu/news_releases/2008/july/dark-mice.html
It seems that dark skinned (I'm assuming here with large amounts of melanin) mice have the ability to produce a protein called p53 which increases apoptosis (programmed cell death) which in some cases prevents cancers, but in this case causes anemia by its effects on the bone marrow. It just goes to show you that biology is a lot more complicated than it looks on the surface.
In addition, life began and evolved in an environment with much higher levels of radiation than today. Just considering the radioactive decay of naturally occurring long lived isotopes, the average radiation levels when life is believed to have begun on Earth would have been about 7 times higher than today's levels. That's not even considering the additional levels of radiation from whatever the early atmosphere allowed from solar and other cosmic sources of radiation. So, it should be no surprise that some forms of life can thrive at high radiation levels like the radio-resistant bacteria radiodurans.
http://web.mst.edu/~microbio/BIO221_2000/Deinococcus_radiodurans.html
keep human consumption out of this
At the risk of sounding like a yahoo here amongst all you scientific minds, allow me to extrapolate a theory.
Fungi which are melanin rich and developed with the help and as a direct result of extremely high levels of radiation being consumed by humans is not a good idea. The fungi grow melanin. The cancerous growths which take over the body in the deadly skin cancer melanoma are essentially melanin growths (Melanoma is a cancer that begins in the melanocytes. Because most of these cells still make melanin, melanoma tumors are often brown or black). The damage caused in a human by ingesting high levels of this unknown and untested new life form would be epic. And in everyone's enthusiasm (including E. Dadachova http://lib.bioinfo.pl/auth:Dadachova,E) the tranformation which may occur on a cellular level hasn't been taken into account. And don't defend the idea with the simplistic argument that the fungi would be tested on mice, etc. We've all seen tests skewed and punched up to promote and market new pharmaceuticals.
radioactive fungi
Absolutely mind bogling. The adaptability of life seems almost without limit. Seems quite likely we should find life elsewhere in the universe.
jaxshark
we should find life elsewhere in the universe
I'd say, they have found us already, a long, long ago.
z.
Please visit this link on how mushrooms can save the world
This was so inspiring, please watch it- Thanks
Gene
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/paul_stamets_on_6_ways_mushrooms_can_save_the_world.html
Silent Spring
The spring ain't so silent in Chernobyl, there's life even inside that reactor!