DNA analysis suggests Lake Vostok harbors animal life

If it weren't for several kilometers of ice, this is what Lake Vostok would look like.

Columbia University

Recently, a Russian research team reached the waters of Lake Vostok. Vostok is one of the largest lakes on Earth, but escaped attention for many years because it's buried under 3,700m of ice in Antarctica. There's no word yet on what's been found in the waters of the lake itself, but researchers have now had a glimpse at the life present within it. That's because some of the lake's waters freeze onto the underside of a glacier that transits across the surface of the lake, trapping any organisms within it.

By sequencing the DNA and RNA trapped in the ice, the authors found what appears to be a diverse community of bacterial species, including some that suggest that Vostok has the equivalent of deep-sea hydrothermal vents. And, perhaps more intriguingly, it appears to have animals living under the ice.

The challenge with any of these studies is avoiding contamination (see, for example, the bigfoot genome). So, the authors of this paper took a rather extreme measure to eliminate it: they chilled some bleach, and dipped the ice cores in that to wipe out anything that might have accumulated on the surface. They also froze some sterile water, and treated it identically to the their ice core samples. These controls did produce some DNA sequences, but the vast majority of it was human, human acne bacteria, the E. coli bacteria used in labs, or, oddly, cow (maybe someone was eating lunch in lab that day?).