ArticleNature communications2023
Dark microbiome and extremely low organics in Atacama fossil delta unveil Mars life detection limits.
Article in Nature communications, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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13 citing papers in PubMed, 33 citations in OpenAlex.
- Mars sample return campaign: biological risk and a proposed sample safety assessment protocol.Applied and environmental microbiology · 2026Article
- Vulnerable microbial communities in Atacama-Altiplano wetlands: modern analogs of ancient ecosystems with implications for sustainability and conservation.FEMS microbes · 2026Review
- The astrochemical evolutionary traits of phospholipid membrane homochirality.Nature reviews. Chemistry · 2024Review
- Sea spray allows for the growth of subaerial microbialites at the driest desert on Earth.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Biosignature Molecules Accumulate and Persist in Evaporitic Brines: Implications for Planetary Exploration.Astrobiology · 2024Article
- Exploring the Impact of Coconut Peat and Vermiculite on the Rhizosphere Microbiome of Pre-Basic Seed Potatoes under Soilless Cultivation Conditions.Microorganisms · 2024Article
- Carbonate precipitation and phosphate trapping by microbialite isolates from an alkaline insular lake (Bagno dell'Acqua, Pantelleria Island, Italy).Frontiers in microbiology · 2024Article
- Effect of castration timing and weaning strategy on the taxonomic and functional profile of ruminal bacteria and archaea of beef calves.Animal microbiome · 2023Article
- Exploring the evidence of Middle Amazonian aquifer sedimentary outburst residues in a Martian chaotic terrain.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- DNA sequencing at the picogram level to investigate life on Mars and Earth.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- The Hypothesis of a "Living Pulse" in Cells.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Life on Mars, can we detect it?Nature communications · 2023Article
- Ecological successions throughout the desiccation of Tirez lagoon (Spain) as an astrobiological time-analog for wet-to-dry transitions on Mars.Scientific reports · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
39 authors at 15 institutions in 6 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Identifying unequivocal signs of life on Mars is one of the most important objectives for sending missions to the red planet. Here we report Red Stone, a 163-100 My alluvial fan-fan delta that formed under arid conditions in the Atacama Desert, rich in hematite and mudstones containing clays such as vermiculite and smectites, and therefore geologically analogous to Mars. We show that Red Stone samples display an important number of microorganisms with an unusual high rate of phylogenetic indeterminacy, what we refer to as "dark microbiome", and a mix of biosignatures from extant and ancient microorganisms that can be barely detected with state-of-the-art laboratory equipment. Our analyses by testbed instruments that are on or will be sent to Mars unveil that although the mineralogy of Red Stone matches that detected by ground-based instruments on the red planet, similarly low levels of organics will be hard, if not impossible to detect in Martian rocks depending on the instrument and technique used. Our results stress the importance in returning samples to Earth for conclusively addressing whether life ever existed on Mars.
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