Introduction: The presence of hypersaline brines on other planets and moons in the inner and outer Solar System has been well established.
Despite growing evidence for the role of DNA methylation in bacterial acclimation to environmental stress, this epigenetic mechanism remains unexplored in sea-ice microbial communities known to tolerate multiple stressors.
During the microbial surveillance of the International Space Station (ISS) in April 2018, four Gram-stain positive bacterial strains, designated as F6_8S_P_2BT, F6_8S_P_3A, F6_8S_P_3B and F6_8S_P_3C, belonging to the genus Microbacterium […]
Microbial exoenzymes—extracellular enzymes secreted to degrade complex organic polymers— are essential for recycling carbon and nutrients, thus sustaining primary productivity in today’s oceans.
Published in Frontiers in Science, this is the new ambition of the Earth BioGenome Project (EBP)—a global network of scientists sequencing the genomes of Earth’s eukaryotes. Its goal? To create […]
As we assess the habitability of other worlds, we are limited by being able to only study terrestrial life adapted to terrestrial conditions.
Editor’s note: If we aspire to mount expeditions to new worlds and then embrace the task of characterizing and quantifying whatever life forms we find, the ability to map and […]
More than three billion years of evolution have produced an image of biology encoded into the space of natural proteins.
This game-changing bacterium is called Thermus aquaticus, and it can withstand temperatures as high as 80°C. It’s an example of an extremophile – an organism capable of living in extreme […]
Creating a living system from nonliving matter is a great challenge in chemistry and biophysics. The early history of life can provide inspiration from the idea of the prebiotic “RNA […]
