How do we simulate Mars here on Earth? We scrutinized Mars rover data so you don’t have to. 😛 Here’s what it tells us about how to simulate Mars on Earth, and which organisms could grow on Mars! 📄 Report: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Terraforming Mars is a hard problem. You need to warm the entire planet by tens of degrees and make enough oxygen for humans to breathe. But you don’t need to make a magnetic field to live outside on a terraformed Mars.

This tube is a library of bacteria with every single-base-pair genome mutation, all DNA-barcoded. 🧪Growth + barcode sequencing = data on millions of mutations. 📄 Report: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Retweet if you want more data, and read on if you want to use the library! 🧵

Most lab automation software is proprietary, expensive, and painful for anybody who codes, so we ditched it. Our liquid handler runs on Python + PyLabRobot, and we're sharing our protocols open-source. pioneerlabs.substack.com/p/we-replace...

In partnership with @pioneerlabs.bsky.social, we’re proposing Tesseract: a large-scale, open microbial phenomics dataset to functionally annotate microbial genomes at scale. 🧬🤖 ✅5M diverse genes x 50 host strains × 100 conditions 🔗 Read the proposal:https://zenodo.org/records/17990299

With bioinformatics, we’re now measuring the fitnesses of millions of DNA fragments! This gets us data on whole genomes and is the first step toward big data for modeling genotype -> phenotype with AI/ML for microbial evolution. Link in comments. 🧬 + 🔢 = 📈 -> 🤖?

Was so fun to talk with @asterainstitute.bsky.social resident and @pioneerlabs.bsky.social founder @erika-alden.bsky.social! Read our convo if you want to be inspired about the future of life, bioengineering, and engineered life on Mars asterainstitute.substack.com/p/lets-go-do...

Check out 🏆A Biologist’s Guide to Mars Dirt, where we present a receipt for soluble Mars Regolith Media (sMRM) that best simulates what you’d get if you added water to Mars dirt. Will anything grow in this media? Stay tuned! 💧+ 🪨 → 🌱 ? open.substack.com/pub/pioneerl...

Want to follow along as we engineer microbes for circular biomanufacturing in space? We're launching open science updates through our substack! ⬇️