Nanobacteria revelations provoke new controversy
19:00 19 May 04

Some claim they are a new life form responsible for a wide-range of
diseases, including the calcification of the arteries that afflicts us all
as we age. Others say they are simply too small to be living creatures.

Now a team of doctors has entered the fray surrounding the existence or
otherwise of nanobacteria. After four years' work, the team, based at the
Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, has come up with some of the best
evidence yet that they do exist.

Cautiously titled "Evidence of nanobacterial-like structures in human
calcified arteries and cardiac valves", the paper by John Lieske and his
team describes how they isolated minuscule cell-like structures from
diseased human arteries.

A question of size

These particles self-replicated in culture, and could be identified with an
antibody and a DNA stain. "The evidence is suggestive," is all Lieske
claims.

Critics are not convinced. "I just don't think this is real," says Jack
Maniloff of the University of Rochester in New York. "It is the cold fusion
of microbiology." John Cisar of the National Institutes of Health is equally
sceptical. "There are always people who are trying to keep this alive. It's
like it is on life support."

Kidney stones

The first claims about nanobacteria came from geologists studying tiny
cell-like structures in rock slices. But in 1998 the debate took a different
twist when Olavi Kajander and Neva Ciftcioglu of the University of Kuopio in
Finland claimed to have found nanobacteria, surrounded by a calcium-rich
mineral called apatite, in human kidney stones.

Objections were raised immediately. Many of the supposed nanobacteria were
less than 100 nanometres across, smaller than many viruses, which cannot
replicate independently. Maniloff's work suggests that to contain the DNA
and proteins needed to function, a cell must be at least 140 nanometres
across.

Kajander and Ciftcioglu, however, insisted that they had observed the
nanoparticles self-replicating in a culture medium and claimed to have
identified a unique DNA sequence. How could this be explained if the cells
were not alive, they asked.

Cisar has an answer to this. After studying nanoparticles found in saliva,
his team published a paper in 2000 claiming that the DNA detected by the
Finnish team was a contaminant from a normal bacterium. "It wasn't until we
couldn't get any unique nucleic acids that we suddenly realised we were
being tricked," he says. The paper also said that what looked liked
self-replication was just an unusual process of crystal growth.

"This just stopped everything in its tracks," says Virginia
Miller, a member
of Lieske's team. "It is cited as the gospel to why all the papers by
Kajander are rubbish... The debate is very polarised and that has shocked me
a bit."

Some say the claims of Cisar's team are also fantastic. "They talk about
'self-propagating apatite'," says Jorgen Christoffersen, who studies
biomineralisation at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. "This is
scientific nonsense."

Read the rest at New Scientist
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99995009

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek.
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