The search for organic matter on Mars has rapidly evolved in the past decade with simple aromatic, S-heterocycles, and aliphatic organic molecules detected in Gale crater.
Editor’s note: with recent speculation about the potential habitability of other worlds and understanding the processes whereby other biospheres arise and evolve, thought needs to be given to developing sensor […]
Enceladus and Europa are compelling targets for astrobiology investigations due to their potentially habitable subsurface oceans connected to the icy surface by geological processes.
We analyzed the lipidome of the endolithic community in halite nodules from Salar Grande in the hyperarid Atacama Desert, which is considered an analog for martian subsurface environments.
In this paper, we report a fully automated, end-to-end (sample-in/data-out) capillary electrophoresis system.
The surface and subsurface of worlds beyond Mars remain largely unexplored. Yet these worlds hold keys to fundamental questions in planetary science – from potentially habitable subsurface oceans on icy […]
The search for signatures of life beyond Earth has been a major goal of space research and astrobiology for decades. The combination of expanded knowledge on Solar System bodies from […]
![Overview. (a) Composition of a bacterial cell by weight, with a breakdown of the chemical constituents [21]. About 40% of these compounds are not properly covered in existing datasets. (b) Multi-step workflow used to construct QCell, beginning with the selection of building blocks, followed by conformational sampling and fragment selection, pre-optimization with DFTB+MBD, and finally hybrid PBE0+MBD(-NL) calculations. (c) Coverage of molecular species at the PBE0+MBD(-NL) level of theory, including entries from existing databases and newly generated QCell data for nucleic acid fragments, lipids, sugars, solvated ions, and dimers. -- AI for Science](https://i0.wp.com/astrobiology.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Mapping-The-Molecules-Of-Life.png?resize=1200%2C719&ssl=1)
Machine learning force fields (MLFFs) are rapidly transforming molecular simulations by combining the accuracy of quantum mechanics with the speed of classical approaches. However, training reliable MLFFs for biological systems […]
After years of lab work, the results are in: A rock that NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover drilled and analyzed in 2020 includes the most diverse collection of organic molecules ever […]
Saturn’s moon Titan is a prime destination for investigating prebiotic chemistry beyond Earth, particularly at impact crater sites where transient liquid water may have enabled aqueous reactions between organic molecules.
