ArticleLife (Basel, Switzerland)2020
Synthetic Biology for Terraformation Lessons from Mars, Earth, and the Microbiome.
Article in Life (Basel, Switzerland), 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 27 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
27 citing papers in PubMed.
- Environmental Release of Genetically Intervened Microorganisms: Towards a New Narrative.Microbial biotechnology · 2026Review
- Synthetic horizontal gene transfer for ecosystem restoration.Biology direct · 2026Article
- The role of extremophile microbiomes in terraforming Mars.Communications biology · 2025Review
- Eco-Inspired terraform networks emerge from material self-organization.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Bifurcations and phase transitions in the origins of life.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Microbes Saving Lives and Reducing Suffering.Microbial biotechnology · 2025Article
- Open problems in synthetic multicellularity.NPJ systems biology and applications · 2024Article
- Synthetic Ecosystems: From the Test Tube to the Biosphere.ACS synthetic biology · 2024Review
- The Sixth Mass Extinction and Amphibian Species Sustainability Through Reproduction and Advanced Biotechnologies, Biobanking of Germplasm and Somatic Cells, and Conservation Breeding Programs (RBCs).Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Review
- Ecological Civilisation and Amphibian Sustainability through Reproduction Biotechnologies, Biobanking, and Conservation Breeding Programs (RBCs).Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Review
- A synthetic microbial Daisyworld: planetary regulation in the test tube.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2024Article
- A microbial evolutionary approach for a sustainable future.Microbial biotechnology · 2023Article
- Epistemology of synthetic biology: a new theoretical framework based on its potential objects and objectives.Frontiers in bioengineering and biotechnology · 2023Article
- A miniaturized bionic ocean-battery mimicking the structure of marine microbial ecosystems.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Ecological complexity and the biosphere: the next 30 years.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Environmental Galenics: large-scale fortification of extant microbiomes with engineered bioremediation agents.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- Network-level containment of single-species bioengineering.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Ecological firewalls for synthetic biology.iScience · 2022Article
- PREGO: A Literature and Data-Mining Resource to Associate Microorganisms, Biological Processes, and Environment Types.Microorganisms · 2022Article
- 15 years of microbial biotechnology: the time has come to think big-and act soon.Microbial biotechnology · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
What is the potential for synthetic biology as a way of engineering, on a large scale, complex ecosystems? Can it be used to change endangered ecological communities and rescue them to prevent their collapse? What are the best strategies for such ecological engineering paths to succeed? Is it possible to create stable, diverse synthetic ecosystems capable of persisting in closed environments? Can synthetic communities be created to thrive on planets different from ours? These and other questions pervade major future developments within synthetic biology. The goal of engineering ecosystems is plagued with all kinds of technological, scientific and ethic problems. In this paper, we consider the requirements for terraformation, i.e., for changing a given environment to make it hospitable to some given class of life forms. Although the standard use of this term involved strategies for planetary terraformation, it has been recently suggested that this approach could be applied to a very different context: ecological communities within our own planet. As discussed here, this includes multiple scales, from the gut microbiome to the entire biosphere.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.