{"id":685113,"date":"2025-08-14T21:25:14","date_gmt":"2025-08-14T18:25:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/simple-instrument-could-find-martian-dna-if-it-exists\/"},"modified":"2025-08-14T21:25:14","modified_gmt":"2025-08-14T18:25:14","slug":"simple-instrument-could-find-martian-dna-if-it-exists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/simple-instrument-could-find-martian-dna-if-it-exists\/","title":{"rendered":"Simple instrument could find Martian DNA if it exists"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n Graphic showing the functionality of the ALF. Credit: NASA \/ ALFA \/ Steven Benner
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Mars still holds the promise of being one of the first places in the solar system humanity will colonize. However, if there was evolutionarily distinct, extant life on the planet, it might sway the heart of even the most ardent Mars colonization fans. So astrobiologists are in a race against time to try to determine whether or not such life exists, before the entire planet becomes an analog of Earth’s biosphere, if only unintentionally, and only a shadow of the ones that exist here.<\/p>\n

A new paper from Christopher Temby and Jan Spacek of the Agnostic Life Finder (ALF) team discusses one of the most promising ways to prove definitively that life exists on the Red Planet\u2014finding polyelectrolyte polymers\u2014in other words, DNA. The research is published<\/a> on the arXiv<\/i> preprint server.<\/p>\n

DNA isn’t the only type of polyelectrolyte polymer in our own biosphere\u2014RNA is another example. But the reason that finding a polyelectrolyte is so important is because of their ability to convey information between generations. Mars could have an entirely separate way of passing down genetic information from anything we know of on Earth, but it would still likely look at least something like a polyelectrolyte polymer.<\/p>\n

In a landmark paper in 2018, NASA staff laid out what is now known as the “Ladder of Life Detection,” where polyelectrolytes are discussed as a possible biosignature. However, there are also a few weaknesses the molecules exhibit that have to be overcome by any instrument planning to find them.<\/p>\n

The first problem is that the polyelectrolytes could be so dilute that they wouldn’t reach the detection threshold of the instrument designed to find them, especially if the total amount of biomass is minuscule compared to that found on Earth. This problem is easily solved by concentrating the polyelectrodes using electrodialysis and a set of porous membranes.<\/p>\n

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