Edwin Kite

In 2010 I helped put on @NASAAmes's first workshop on what synthetic biology could do for space exploration. @lynnjrothschild, my adviser at Ames, and I spent years arguing that you could send a single cell to Mars and let it build from whatever it found there. The microbe was never the hard part. Earth already has bugs that make plastic, food, and fuel. The hard part was the dirt. Nobody knew what Martian regolith actually gives a cell to eat, or how badly the perchlorate, salts, and heavy metals would hurt it. You can't model your way out of that question. Someone has to grow things in it. That's exactly what @Pioneer__Labs has been doing, and this week they showed it works. First they turned real rover and lander data, from Phoenix's Wet Chemistry Lab and Curiosity's SAM instrument, into Defined Mars Media: a lab recipe for the nutrients and toxins in Mars dirt. Then they screened 16 Earth organisms against it and ran more than a trillion cumulative cell divisions of evolution. The result is sPL.001, a strain of Cupriavidus necator that pulls every nutrient it needs from Martian dirt, water, and air, and makes more than 3x the PHA bioplastic of its parent. It needs no fertilizer from Earth and no washing the perchlorate out first. Their reference design says one rocket's worth of equipment could build radiation-shielded habitats for a small city in about four years. It's also built to be safe. It only grows inside a bioreactor fed acetate made from Martian CO2. Even a catastrophic leak clears planetary protection limits by several hundred times. This is what data generation looks like for an interplanetary species. Rover measurements became a lab recipe, the recipe became a trillion cell divisions of experiments, and the experiments produced an organism. Pioneer is the only team I know of doing this end to end. Congrats to @erika_alden_d and co-founder @StorkDevon, and to @unattermann, Tom Pedersen, Nathan Hicks, Jordan Mancuso, Karin Isaev, Max Schubert, Fatima Martin, Jonathan Liu, Harley Greene, and Edward Sukarto. Thanks to @AsteraInstitute for backing it. @lynnjrothschild, Pete Worden, Stephanie Langhoff, Chad Paavola: this is where that 2010 workshop was pointing. Last year I joined Erika, Chris McKay, Pamela Silver, @edwinkite, Robin Wordsworth, @mason_lab, and others on a @NatureAstronomy paper making the case for Mars terraforming research. Organism one of five is already here. Erika has spoken at @SynBioBeta, and so has @NikoMcCarty, whose @AsimovPress interview with her is the best 51 minutes you can spend on this. It is a joy to see this research making headways and I am excited to see what the future holds.