Project description
Special microorganisms could make Mars exploration sustainable
Space agencies worldwide aim to send humans to Mars over the coming decades. Human presence there could help accelerate understanding of the universe at an unprecedented pace. A major challenge is producing necessary resources like food and oxygen on Mars, as shipping them from Earth is not feasible over the long term. Instead, they should be produced on site. Nostocaceae cyanobacteria could help with this by using Martian materials to create the necessary resources. The ERC-funded MarCyano project will seek to understand how these bacteria function under Martian conditions and use advanced technologies to develop sustainable bioprocesses. Project outcomes could help revolutionise Mars exploration and open new avenues for sustainability on Earth.
Objective
The worlds major space agencies share a goal of sending humans to Mars within the next few decades. A sustainable human presence there, akin to todays presence in Antarctica, could generate paradigm-shifting knowledge at an unprecedented pace. One major challenge lies in providing the food, oxygen and other necessary consumables: these cannot be shipped from the Earth over the long term. They should instead be produced on site and for this, Nostocaceae cyanobacteria can be instrumental: fed with materials available in the Martian ground and atmosphere, they could provide feedstock for a range of bioprocesses which, in turn, could produce a wide range of consumables. However, fundamental knowledge is lacking to turn this concept into practical solutions: the physiology of cyanobacteria in the foreseen cultivation conditions is poorly understood. These conditions combine low total pressures, low partial pressures of dinitrogen, interactions with a basaltic substrate from which nutrients are leached, and high concentrations of chaotropic salts.
In the proposed project, I will enable a deep understanding of cyanobacterial physiology in these conditions. For this I will employ a unique approach combining cultivation assays in unique hardware previously developed by my team, adaptive laboratory evolution, cutting-edge omics technologies, the development of a mathematical model which can predict the productivity and efficiency of cyanobacterium cultivation from Martian resources, and the construction of a testbed for the experimental validation of this model. I will use the generated knowledge and tools to design, characterize and demonstrate the viability of bioprocesses which dramatically improve the odds that Mars exploration is done in a sustainable way. Finally, I will adapt the concepts developed for bioproduction on Mars to open new avenues for sustainability on Earth, which I plan to follow up by applying for an ERC Proof of Concept Grant.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- social scienceseconomics and businesseconomicsproduction economicsproductivity
- medical and health sciencesbasic medicinephysiology
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Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
28359 Bremen
Germany