The new question: surviving the initial impact shock

18:50the episode we talked about how our genomes our DNA degrades over time. >> Yeah, yeah, naturally. Naturally, this thing has repair mechanisms >> really cool. >> in order to just keep itself alive. The ring structure of the nucleoid is a big part of it. The DNA is actually packed into a torus. It's like a donut-style shape. So, it keeps the fragments physically close together versus a double helix. >> Yeah, well, no, it's still a double helix, but it's rounded. But the double helix is wrapped around in a torus. Which gives it a little extra help. >> Yeah, it's sort of not like in a soupy like most bacterium, the the chromosome is like in this like soupy non-structure form. This one is in a nice toroid,

19:31okay? So, it's got physical proximity for easy reassembly. It also has multiple genome copies. Every single one of its cells has four to 10 copies per cell. It's like that stuff we were talking about with GitHub. Yes. It's got several branches. >> Yes. So, if one single branch of your GitHub is like messed up, it can use the others to actually figure out how to repair itself, right? Exceptional DNA repair. Um one of the other cool things is it has extraordinary antioxidant defense. In 2004, there was a paper that came out in Science that suggested that, you know, over the course of radiation, you're going to have these things called reactive oxygen species. Oxygen is incredibly reactive. That's why things

20:13rust, right? Iron rusts in normal atmospheric conditions cuz the oxygen is reacting with the iron. Well, same thing happens in life. You have these reactive oxygen species. But these guys have so many so much high concentration of manganese antioxidants, which are like manganese ions, small peptides that can scavenge and take care of that reactive oxygen. So, it's keeping all of that reactive mechanism at bay. And finally, the cell envelope is really weird. The border of the cell to the outside, it's multi-layered and the outer layer is this S-layer crystalline surface layer. You can see it looks like a crystal. It's a hexagonal lattice where you've

20:53got this like fundamental unit and it repeats itself. Yeah, yeah. It's kind of like a shell Yeah, yeah, yeah. around the bacterium that is keeping that is like reinforcing that structure. It's it's It reminds me of when people talk about fractals. Yes. Like fractal patterns. >> It's like super structure-y, right? It almost looks like a virus, but it's the size of a bacteria, which is 100 times larger, you know? Um and it acts like a suit of armor providing this immense structural rigidity. So, there's there's a there's a There's the physical structure of this bacterium is such that it gets this extra layer of

21:36outer protection and has this genetic benefit of the structure of DNA such that external forces can't do a lot to it. >> Yeah, exactly. Like when radiation comes in and like messes up its DNA, it's got repair mechanisms that'll just get right on it. >> we we got more." Yeah. Exactly. >> They got It's It's like the robots. When we replace humans with robots, it's just like where you can manufacture them quickly and it's not unique, you know, and all the the time it takes to have a human grow to be an adult and stuff like that. You can just be like, "Oh, robot out of the factory. It's already got it. We're ready to >> Exactly. Yeah, dude. Conan the bacterium. >> bacterium This guy is crazy. Okay, so now let's look at Can this thing survive