Abstract
One of the main tasks of NASA's planetary protection program is to prevent the forward contamination of extraterrestrial environments with Earth life, and in turn preserve other planets and the integrity of future life detection missions. Despite information regarding bacterial diversity in NASA's clean rooms, little is known about the presence of Archaea. Archaeal community analysis of spacecraft-associated surfaces is important, as they are considered by some to represent terrestrial life most capable of surviving on Mars. The first insights into the archaeal diversity of clean rooms where spacecraft assembled are attempted. Nucleic acid sequences clustering with uncultivable Archaea within the Eury- and Crenarchaeota were retrieved from 8 of 26 samples collected from several spacecraft assembly clean rooms. Due to their potential capability to survive and proliferate in Martian conditions, screening for Archaea on spacecraft surfaces and instruments that are associated with future life detection missions may be necessary.
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Acknowledgements
This research was carried out at JPL/Caltech under a contract with NASA and funded by Mars Sample Return Mission program as well as by NRA ROSS 2005. We thank Jerome Smith and Anne Dekas (JPL), Judith Allton, Karen McNamara, and Carlton Allen (JSC) for helping to sample various locations and Shariff Osman for critically reading this manuscript. We acknowledge John Rummel, NASA Planetary Protection Officer for constant encouragements and Jason Kastner for facilitating various lab facilities.
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Moissl, C., Bruckner, J. & Venkateswaran, K. Archaeal diversity analysis of spacecraft assembly clean rooms. ISME J 2, 115–119 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/ismej.2007.98
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/ismej.2007.98
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