When NASA scientists announced that instruments on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter sensed signs of liquid water seeping on the Martian surface, they meant a solution salty enough to kill most living things on Earth. Temperatures on Mars are well below zero, so any liquid water would have to be loaded with salt – and probably not ordinary sodium chloride but something nastier—perchlorates, which are used in rocket fuel.
You wouldn’t want to drink it, but such a toxic brew wouldn’t kill everything, says biologist Shiladitya DasSarma of the University of Maryland, who studies salt-loving organisms, known as halophiles. These organisms flourish in the Great Salt Lake, the Red Sea, and the world’s briniest marshes. Some have been isolated from a frigid lake in Antarctica. “I think it’s quite possible there are halophiles that could survive on Mars,” he says.
Bugs with extreme adaptations tend to be useful because evolution has endowed them with proteins that have unusual resilience to heat, salt, chemical exposures, or other conditions that might be necessary for some industrial or medical process. Researchers borrowed an enzyme from a bacteria that thrives in the hot springs in Yellowstone National Park at temperatures as high as 131 F° to invent one of biology’s most useful tools—polymerase chain reaction, or PCR.
To read more, click here.