Oops: Potential 'New' Life in Antarctic Lake is Actually Contaminants

Russian researchers are withdrawing earlier statements that they had found a new type of bacteria, seemingly unrelated to all known organisms on the planet, from the ancient subglacial Lake Vostok. It turns out they are just contaminants.

A preliminary examination of water samples from Lake Vostok near the South Pole showed that new DNA was found. Sergei Bulat, a researcher at the Laboratory of Eukaryote Genetics at the St. Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute, originally told RIA that they "call it unidentified and 'unclassified' life."

The researchers are now recanting their earlier statements after Eukaryote Genetics Laboratory head Vladimir Korolyov said to Interfax News Agency that they actually did not find any new signs of life. He said they just found contaminants.

"We found certain specimen, although not many, but all of them belonged to contaminants (microorganisms from the bore-hole kerosene, human bodies or the lab). There was one strain of bacteria which we did not find in drilling liquid, but the bacteria could in principal use kerosene as an energy source," Korolyov said.

"That is why we cannot say that previously-unknown life was found," he added.

Russia had been hoping to discover a new life form at the pristine site and the drilling was of major importance for the prestige to the country's science program.

However, Bulat and his colleague Valery Lukin insisted to the Associated Press that the bacterium has no relation to any of the existing types, though extensive research of the microbe that was sealed under the ice for millions of years will be necessary to prove the find and determine the bacterium's characteristics.

A U.S. team also recently found microbes at the surface of Lake Whillans, a shallower subglacial body of water west of the South Pole. The scientists are yet to determine what forms of bacteria they found.