Nonetheless, the tiny and peculiar putative organisms described by the UQ researchers appear to embody some distinctly life-like properties, including structures similar to fungi, nucleic acids, and a capacity to grow. Nanobes grow on various substrates under ordinary culture conditions. However, they also can withstand harsh treatments, such as the high vacuum and intense electron beams, that they have been subjected to during analysis by scanning and transmission electron microscopy. Even if they came into the drill-core samples as contaminants, which the UQ researchers say is highly unlikely, knowing that nanobes came from somewhere else would do little to explain away their unusually small size and other properties and behavior. Then, after successfully adapting an alternative extraction procedure for this purpose, funds ran out, she notes.
Some experts continue to voice skepticism at the mere mention of nanobes.
Subsurface organisms are often slow growing in response to low levels of nutrients. He and others, such as Terrance Beveridge of the University of Guelph in Canada, speculate that the UQ researchers may be seeing membrane vesicles derived from gram-negative bacteria rather than autonomously replicating cells. A related possibility is that nanobes are some other form of cellular debris, according to John Baross of the University of Washington in Seattle. Baross and others suggest that nucleic acid analysis, particularly of 16S ribosomal genes, will be essential for determining whether nanobes are mundane artifacts or unique microorganisms.