Physiological and evolutionary responses of cyanobacteria in a sustainable Mars exploration program

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.