The future of scientific research is in the infinite of space and in the details of the very smallest things on this planet and they are dark.
Dark matter: you have probably heard the term but do you actually know what it is? Dark matter, in astronomy, are the subatomic particles that do not interact with electromagnet radiation such as light and is, consequently, completely invisible throughout the whole electromagnetic spectrum making it dark (where it gets its name although it might have been more accurate to call it invisible matter but that may conjure up the mystical to most folks.).These atoms are thought to outnumber ordinary atoms five to one (making it approximately 85% of the known universe) and to date are completely hypothetical. It is generally accepted in the scientific community because of the gravitational effects that it seems to have on galaxies and galaxy clusters but there are also many observations that do not fit into the dark matter theory. There is much research being done in this field and has been the IT girl for a few years and in part why the Hadron collider exists.
This dark matter almost all of you will have heard of even if you do not fully understand what it is but there is also dark matter in biology. I know a physicist who hates it when biologists ‘steal’ a physics term for their science but this is another example of borrowing a term. Biological dark matter is the stuff that does not fall into the one of the present domains of life: eukaryotes (def.: organisms consisting of a cell or cells that have a distinct nucleus containing genetic material in the form of DNA and includes all living organisms except bacteria and archaea), bacteria, or archaea (a single-celled organism that is not bacteria). Biological dark matter is an informal term that represents whatever else is left over, simply stated. It includes non-coding DNA, junk DNA, and non-coding RNA and is found in humans and other organisms. We know a lot about DNA but there is still so much to learn. Dark DNA is the genetic code that currently does not have a known origin.
In the world of microbiology, less than 10% of the species can be isolated and grown in a lab so makes the study of them extremely difficult. Metagenomics is the study and genetic sequencing of a specific environment. The test example can be taken from a geyser or from inside your intestinal tract (as examples) and then that entire community can be genetically sequenced. They would then subtract those known DNA sequences and then search the data for anything that would look similar to something known. Much of what is unattributed could come from a new species. “It’s like getting a mix-up of lots of different jigsaw puzzles, and then trying to put together the pieces of each individual puzzle,” says Donovan Parks at the University of Queensland in Australia. Parks and his team have been working to identify thousands of these DNA sequences. They reconstructed 7280 bacterial and 623 archaeal genomes of which a third were newly discovered. These new discoveries also put 20 new major branches (phyla) to our tree of life and could quite possibly lead to the discovery of that new domain of life.
Some scientists believe that they are on the verge of discovering a fourth domain and this would mark the first time the biological tree of life has been redrawn since bacteria and archaea were divided into two separate classifications in the early 1990s. Others believe that there is a hole in their understanding on how DNA works so are not as quick to say that there is another form of life. But whatever may come of the search into dark matter in astrophysics or in biology, one thing is certain and that is that we do not know as much as we think we know.
–Janice Willson
There are so many videos on this topic. Here are a few I personally found interesting:
https://www.ted.com/talks/nathan_wolfe_what_s_left_to_explore#t-170497
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJLxyp5PDeU
https://www.facebook.com/ScienceNaturePage/videos/1339172606214994/
Photo Source: NASA, ESA, Hubble Heritage Team, A. Nota, Westerlund 2 Science Team,The Universe; Anatoly Mikhaltsov, Eleutheroccus stem cross section
