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Abstract EANA2024-117


Geochemical environment and organics in micro-habitants inside Martian meteorites dictate a methodology to study samples from Mars Sample Return (MSR) missions

Elias Chatzitheodoridis (1,2), Dirk Schulze-Makuch (3), Anja Schreiber4, Yuqian (Evelyn) (Zhang 5,6), Yuguang Liu (5-7), Marina Walther-Antonio (5,6,8), Christos Georgiou (9)
(1) National Technical University of Athens, Greece, (2) ESA/ESTEC, Netherlands, (3) Technische Universität Berlin, Germany, (4) Helmholtz Centre Potsdam (GFZ) German Research Centre for Geosciences, Germany, (5) Department of Surgery, Division of Surgical Research, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN 55905, USA, (6) Microbiome Program, Center for Individualized Medicine, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN 55905, USA, (7) Department of Immunology, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN 55905, USA, (8) Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN 55905, USA, (9) University of Patras, Greece


Assessing habitability and the search for life on Mars proves to be very difficult, despite all the knowledge we have already acquired. The link between living organisms and the environment in which they exist is decisive in order to progress with our assessments. However, the instruments we have sent to Mars are incapable of providing information in the micron/submicron scale and in its subsurface. Thus, meteorites are still an asset for our investigations, especially those that contain geochemical microhabitats that may have been putative homes for Martian life. Our very detailed investigations using TOF-SIMS mass spectrometry in combination with a new method to perform genome amplification on microsamples that we have acquired from the internals of such microhabitats using Focused Ion Beam (FIB) techniques, reveals important information about the changing geochemical microenvironment, the organics contained in this, and the way we can identify terrestrial contamination. This results to a concise methodology which we propose to use when samples will be returned from the red planet. The meteorite specimen we have used is the Naklha Martian meteorite and it fulfils all parameters for a microhabitat, specifically in searching for the presence of organics that may potentially be related to life. This work is based on previous detailed work [1] and on the application of the relatively new genome amplification tecnique [2,3,4].

[1] Chatzitheodoridis, E., Haigh, S., Lyon, I., 2014. A Conspicuous Clay Ovoid in Nakhla: Evidence for Subsurface Hydrothermal Alteration on Mars with Implications for Astrobiology. Astrobiology 14, 651–693. https://doi.org/10.1089/ast.2013.1069

[2] Liu, Y., Schulze-Makuch, D., de Vera, J.-P., Cockell, C., Leya, T., Baqué, M., Walther-Antonio, M., 2018. The Development of an Effective Bacterial Single-Cell Lysis Method Suitable for Whole Genome Amplification in Microfluidic Platforms. Micromachines 9, 367. https://doi.org/10.3390/mi9080367

[3] Liu, Y., Jeraldo, P., Jang, J.S., Eckloff, B., Jen, J., Walther-Antonio, M., 2019. Bacterial Single Cell Whole Transcriptome Amplification in Microfluidic Platform Shows Putative Gene Expression Heterogeneity. Anal. Chem. 91, 8036–8044. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.analchem.8b04773

[4] Liu, Y., Yao, J., Walther-Antonio, M., 2019. Whole genome amplification of single epithelial cells dissociated from snap-frozen tissue samples in microfluidic platform. Biomicrofluidics 13, 034109. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.5090235