The superbug "Conan" is the most radiation-resistant life form . As emerges from a study by the specialists of the University of Cagliari , Dario Piano and Domenica Farci , it would be capable of eliminating radioactive waste and will be useful for the nanotechnology sector and the production of antibiotics. The work was published by the journal Pnas.
The duo of teachers has been dealing with Deinococcus radiodurans , commonly called Conan, for over a decade – in the Department of Life and Environmental Sciences, Faculty of Biology and Pharmacy . But recent research has focused on the cell envelope of the bacterium.
Its name, used by insiders, would however be different: Dra , discovered in 1956 during experiments for the sterilization of canned food with gamma rays. « After isolating it, its ability to withstand doses of gamma radiation up to fifteen thousand times higher than those sufficient to kill a man emerged . Other experiments have subsequently shown that it resists freezing, drying, temperature fluctuations. In 2015, an experiment carried out on board the international space station showed that Deinococcus radiodurans was able to survive for a year even outside the orbiting station », says Piano.
Instead, Farci underlines: «Its capacity for self-protection and rapid DNA repair is also surprising. For some Russian and American scientists , its evolution could have taken place on Mars and then spread to Earth after a meteoric impact. But the opposite could be true: a terrestrial bacterium potentially capable of migrating throughout the universe bringing life to other planets.
The research was funded by the National Science Center (Poland) and carried out in collaboration with the Warsaw University of Life Sciences, Central European Institute of Technology Masaryk University (Czech Republic) and Umea University (Sweden).
(Unioneonline/vf)