I know it has been a while since this was news but there were a couple of papers just published in Science which concerned this research.
One was from the lab of Rosemary Redfield, who was one of the more prominent blogosphere critics when the original paper came out and who Moose linked to upthread, there is a version of the paper at Arxiv (
http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.6643) since the final Science version is behind a paywall. This paper tries to replicate some of the original's findings (albeit not with exactly the same methodology) but the results were inconsistent with Wolfe-Simon's hypothesis, finding no significant levels of covalently bound arsenate through mass-spec analysis. They did however find significant free arsenate which was removed by serial washes with distilled water, this supports Redfield's previous suggestions that the arsenate in Wolfe-Simon's results was contamination from the very arsenic rich growth medium the cells were cultured in. They also touch on the point the Mr Jack raised as to the stability of DNA incorporating arsenate being very prone to spontaneous hydrolysis by looking at the degradation of DNA from arsenic and non-arsenic containing media freshly isolated or after 2 months of storage, there was no appreciable increase in degradation in the samples from the arsenic rich medium.
The other paper (
Erb et al., 2012) similarly used mass-spec, although a different form, to analyze nucleic acids from the Wolf-Simon bacterial strain under the conditions from her paper. As with Redfield's paper they did not find any more arsenic associated with the nucleic acids in the cells grown in the high arsenic medium than in ones grown with no arsenic.
TTFN,
WK
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