Team:Brown-Stanford/PowerCell/Introduction

Introduction

Mars is a hostile, desolate environment. In order to live there, humans will have to deal with extreme cold, unfiltered solar radiation, low oxygen, and little water¹. Cellular engineering will solve these problems in time, but that raises a new problem--the extra burden of providing these requirements raises the already considerable needs of these microbes². It may be possible to feed them from a stored cache of growth nutrients for some time, but these basic requirements will have to be extracted from local resources if a self-sustaining colony is to exist.

PowerCell is our solution to this problem; by engineering cyanobacteria to excrete sugar compounds photosynthesized from atmospheric carbon dioxide³, PowerCell will provide other bacterial cultures with a rich carbon source, a basic requirement for producing biomass and other compounds. In addition, PowerCell able to fix atmospheric N2 and release it in a form accessible to bacteria, providing a basic requirement for protein synthesis and other crucial biological functions⁴.

By producing two of the macromolecules essential to bacterial growth, PowerCell will form a metabolic foundation for the biological systems which will eventually enable a settlement on Mars. Other microbes producing oxygen, heat, food, light, and other necessities will follow, and in time, a complete biogenic life support system will be put together, all fueled by PowerCell.

References

¹ R. Hanel, B. Conrath, W. Hovis, V. Kunde, P. Lowman, W. Maguire, J. Pearl, J. Pirraglia, C. Prabhakara, B. Schlachman, G. Levin, P. Straat, T. Burke, Investigation of the Martian environment by infrared spectroscopy on Mariner 9, Icarus, Volume 17, Issue 2, October 1972, Pages 423-442, ISSN 0019-1035, DOI: 10.1016/0019-1035(72)90009-7. (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0019103572900097)

² Weeks, Amy M, and Michelle C Y Chang. 2011. “Constructing de novo biosynthetic pathways for chemical synthesis inside living cells.” Biochemistry 50 (24) (June 21): 5404-5418. doi:10.1021/bi200416g.

³ Niederholtmeyer, Henrike, Bernd T Wolfstädter, David F Savage, Pamela A Silver, and Jeffrey C Way. 2010. “Engineering cyanobacteria to synthesize and export hydrophilic products.” Applied and Environmental Microbiology 76 (11) (June): 3462-3466. doi:10.1128/AEM.00202-10.

⁴ Chaurasia, Akhilesh Kumar, and Shree Kumar Apte. 2011. “Improved eco-friendly recombinant Anabaena sp. strain PCC7120 with enhanced nitrogen biofertilizer potential.” Applied and Environmental Microbiology 77 (2) (January): 395-399. doi:10.1128/AEM.01714-10.