Biologists have found in one of the salt lakes of Spain an extremely unusual alga that can live in the thick "brine" of Martian streams and underground moisture reserves. They talked about this discovery at a conference of the European Planetary Society taking place this week in Berlin.
“The ability of these extremophile microbes to survive on Earth in the same conditions that now prevail on Mars suggests that they could thrive on the red planet. This, in turn, indicates the need for additional protection of Mars from "guests" from the Earth, and allows us to think about terraforming Mars using such algae, "- said Felipe Gomez (Felipe Gomez) from the Astrobiological Center of Spain in Madrid.
For several years now, Gomez and his colleagues have been studying the most "alien" corners of the Earth, such as the Danakil Basin in Ethiopia, in the hope of finding there microbes and multicellular living things that can live and thrive on Mars, as well as in the oceans of Europe and Enceladus.
Gomez and his colleague Rebecca Thombre of the College of Science, Arts and Business in Pune, India, made an extremely interesting discovery studying the flora and fauna of Lake Tires, located in the La Mancha plain in central Spain.
This reservoir, as scientists note, is divided into several poorly communicating parts, some of which are saturated with large amounts of salt and sulfur compounds. These exotic conditions attract many extremophile microbes, whose colonies stain the waters of Tires an exotic reddish yellow color.
Studying their species and genetic diversity, Tombre and Gomez stumbled upon the first plant species capable of living on Mars and withstanding extremely high salt concentrations in water. The new alga was named Dunaliella salina EP-1.
“This subspecies of dunalliel is one of the most salt-tolerant extremophiles on Earth. As a rule, microbes cannot live in saline water bodies for the reason that water begins to “flow out” from their cells. The inhabitant of this lake bypasses this problem by producing glycerol and other molecules that create an analogue of the high concentration of salt inside the cell, which interferes with the escape of moisture,”explains Tombre.
In addition to dunalliels, scientists have found in the waters of Tyrese another potential "colonizer" of Mars - the microbe Halomonas gomseomensis, also capable of carrying high concentrations of salt. Both the one and the other inhabitant of the lake, as noted by Gomez and Tombre, can be used not only for terraforming Mars, but also as components of various biotechnological installations on Earth.
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