Given the limited Mars soil data, is there any use in following your same approach for soil that you have access to? like if you generated or found the same limited data for potting soil from home depot and then made media using the same logic as your Mars media exploration, and tested microbes, would the data from your home depot lab soil be predictive of the actual soil?
Almost certainly not! But that's mostly because soil on Earth is much more than just minerals - it's very rich in organic (humic) matter plus active and inactive microbes. Life has been omnipresent on earth for so long it's hard to find very many places that haven't been chemically changed by it to be more complex and amenable to life. You could do this with sterile soils from deserts & ground-up rock, and that's mostly what previous groups have done with the leachates we talk about!
We're very interested in getting this process started for Mars regolith, since it is required to make arable soil.
If sterile production of chemical such as bioplastics, fuels etc. Supplementing the media to high concentration NaCl (abundant on Mars according to John Hopkins) could allow for non-sterile chemical production in a halophilic microbial host!
Do you have any suggestions? We've got Halomonas campaniensis (DSM 15293) on order because it's been shown to be used for non-sterile PHB production: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30537067/
This recipe is super helpful and will undoubtedly accelerate efforts to identify or engineer organisms for tolerance.
Related to the questions posed, since the media preparation can be tricky, it could certainly help to onboard it with Teknova.
Writing as someone who usually needs to secure grant funding to take on new projects, I think one of the benefits of publishing this in some peer-reviewed form is that it might lend more credibility - not just to this work but to the folks who might propose a larger screen or adaptive laboratory evolution type of project to a NASA-like agency and their associated reviewers. Just my 2c
Fair enough, as you say, both would probably help. If there's academics out there who want to use the media/write a grant we'd love to hear from you. If lack of peer review is preventing people from building on this science it becomes very easy to justify going to the effort to get something, essentially, 'certified.'
Cool stuff! I can’t wait to hear more about the screening approach y’all are considering.
Have you thought about using microbial communities as opposed to individual microbes? I would think that a set of consortiums of soil bacteria/fungi would have more robust metabolic capabilities for surviving and processing martian soil into a viable substrate. Maybe one of the microbe’s niches is to degrade or sequester perchlorates while other microbes activate nitrogen and phosphorus for utilization.
Given the limited Mars soil data, is there any use in following your same approach for soil that you have access to? like if you generated or found the same limited data for potting soil from home depot and then made media using the same logic as your Mars media exploration, and tested microbes, would the data from your home depot lab soil be predictive of the actual soil?
Almost certainly not! But that's mostly because soil on Earth is much more than just minerals - it's very rich in organic (humic) matter plus active and inactive microbes. Life has been omnipresent on earth for so long it's hard to find very many places that haven't been chemically changed by it to be more complex and amenable to life. You could do this with sterile soils from deserts & ground-up rock, and that's mostly what previous groups have done with the leachates we talk about!
We're very interested in getting this process started for Mars regolith, since it is required to make arable soil.
If sterile production of chemical such as bioplastics, fuels etc. Supplementing the media to high concentration NaCl (abundant on Mars according to John Hopkins) could allow for non-sterile chemical production in a halophilic microbial host!
Do you have any suggestions? We've got Halomonas campaniensis (DSM 15293) on order because it's been shown to be used for non-sterile PHB production: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30537067/
This recipe is super helpful and will undoubtedly accelerate efforts to identify or engineer organisms for tolerance.
Related to the questions posed, since the media preparation can be tricky, it could certainly help to onboard it with Teknova.
Writing as someone who usually needs to secure grant funding to take on new projects, I think one of the benefits of publishing this in some peer-reviewed form is that it might lend more credibility - not just to this work but to the folks who might propose a larger screen or adaptive laboratory evolution type of project to a NASA-like agency and their associated reviewers. Just my 2c
Fair enough, as you say, both would probably help. If there's academics out there who want to use the media/write a grant we'd love to hear from you. If lack of peer review is preventing people from building on this science it becomes very easy to justify going to the effort to get something, essentially, 'certified.'
Cool stuff! I can’t wait to hear more about the screening approach y’all are considering.
Have you thought about using microbial communities as opposed to individual microbes? I would think that a set of consortiums of soil bacteria/fungi would have more robust metabolic capabilities for surviving and processing martian soil into a viable substrate. Maybe one of the microbe’s niches is to degrade or sequester perchlorates while other microbes activate nitrogen and phosphorus for utilization.