A new genetically engineered microbe may one day help humanity settle Mars, a nonprofit biotechnology research startup suggests.
Our species has launched nearly 50 missions to Mars since 1960, all of them robotic. If everything goes according to plan, they've all been building toward crewed Red Planet flight, which remains a high priority for national space agencies and private companies alike.
Ideally, human crews there will not rely on shipment after shipment from Earth, but can instead make use of any resources they can unearth on Mars for air, food, water, building supplies and more. Perhaps the most radical possible outcome from this approach is the concept of terraforming Mars — transforming the cold, arid world to support life as we know it.
Now, researchers at Pioneer Labs in Emeryville, California, have developed a microbe they suggest may be a useful, safe first step toward terraforming Mars.
"On Mars, nature will do the same jobs for us that she does on Earth — create fertile soil, shelter, oxygen and food," Erika DeBenedictis, CEO of Pioneer Labs, told Space.com.
A key problem with the idea of terraforming Mars is that the Red Planet's surface is essentially toxic. While raw materials potentially useful for Earth life are found in abundance on Mars, they are mixed in the soil with toxins such as perchlorate, as well as salts that would make growth difficult for most organisms.
Previous strategies for growing plants on Mars included rinsing these poisons out, bringing supplemental fertilizers from Earth, or avoiding Martian soil entirely and using hydroponics. However, Pioneer Labs argues that these approaches do not scale up well in terms of time and expense.
Today, Pioneer Labs is announcing our first step towards terraforming Mars. 🚀🌼 With equipment that fits in just a single rocket launch, we can convert Martian dirt, water, and air into enough building materials to construct a small city on Mars. To do it, we made the first microbe for Mars. We found the best microbe on Earth and used evolution to teach it how to source all of its nutrients directly from Martian materials. The first astronauts will be greeted with safe shelter already filled with water, oxygen, and rocket fuel for the return journey. This is the first step toward using biology to make Mars a friendly place for life. It lets us live off the land and helps us build the next great frontier. It's the first of five organisms we need to green Mars ⬇️September 22, 2026
The organization has developed a microbe, dubbed sPL.001, that can live off artificial, chemically accurate versions of Martian dirt, water and air. It can do this with having the toxins removed, or with fertilizer added. Moreover, it can generate bioplastics — a class of materials used nowadays on Earth for items as diverse as compostable cups and 3D printing filaments — that could be useful for building habitats on the Red Planet.
"Mars has all the raw materials for life in abundance," DeBenedictis said. "Life can grow entirely using nutrients in unprocessed Martian regolith. That’s special and different from other places, like the moon, which doesn’t have nutrients in the regolith."
In a new study, the scientists revealed how they took Earth microbes that could manufacture bioplastics and slowly exposed them to more and more Mars-like conditions over time.
"It wasn’t obvious this was going to work," DeBenedictis said. "The first time we tested growth of terrestrial microbes in Mars conditions, none of them grew! We had to keep going and test a lot more organisms before we realized we had just gotten unlucky the first time."
Eventually, the scientists evolved a tolerance for toxins normally found in Martian soil.
"It was so cool to see these microbes start growing better on simulated Mars nutrients," DeBenedictis said. "Life finds a way!"
To survive, the new microbe needs to grow inside a stirred, heated bioreactor that protects it from extreme temperature, radiation and the thin Martian atmosphere. It must also receive a processed form of air that gives the microbe the valuable nutrient nitrogen in the form of acetate, as normal Martian air has nitrogen levels too dilute for the microbes to live off. The organism is also not photosynthetic, so it cannot make its own food.
In another study, the researchers suggested that these limitations ensure their microbe cannot survive if it ever found its way outside on Mars. These measures reduce the risk that their microbe might contaminate the Red Planet as an invasive organism, especially if Mars ever did develop life of its own that might still exist in underground aquifers or within ancient salt crystals.
Samuel McKee, a DNA repair scientist at the University of Reading in England, found it believable that such a microbe could not accidentally terraform Mars.
"Many adapted or edited microbes on Earth do not survive outside of a fixed environment despite their evolution, or without a certain food supply," McKee, who did not take part in the new research, told Space.com.
In a third study, the scientists estimated that, thanks to the microbe, mission planners could fit everything needed to build a city on Mars onto a single rocket.
"The biggest limitation of what we’ve done is that simulated Mars isn’t actual Mars," DeBenedictis said. "We reconstructed the relevant chemistry of Martian regolith as carefully as we could from high-quality rover data from multiple locations on Mars. But ultimately, the real test will be doing this with actual Martian regolith."
Such research could find use beyond Mars.
"I am excited about how these avenues of research could impact our dealing with climate change on Earth or extreme environment habitats," McKee said. "Microbes can be utilized to generate much of the material and needs we have thanks to gene editing."
All in all, "we will be watching with anticipation when these microbes are finally launched to the Martian surface," McKee said.
