Today, Pioneer Labs is announcing our first step towards terraforming Mars. 🚀🌼 With equipment that fits in just a single rocket launch, we can convert Martian dirt, water, and air into enough building materials to construct a small city on Mars. To do it, we made the first microbe for Mars. We found the best microbe on Earth and used evolution to teach it how to source all of its nutrients directly from Martian materials. The first astronauts will be greeted with safe shelter already filled with water, oxygen, and rocket fuel for the return journey. This is the first step toward using biology to make Mars a friendly place for life. It lets us live off the land and helps us build the next great frontier. It's the first of five organisms we need to green Mars ⬇️

Breaking: @Pioneer__Labs has engineered a microbe able to live on Mars, consuming solely nutrients found on the planet to create building materials. I interviewed @erika_alden_d, the CEO, to learn how they did it and what might come next. Much of the interview was about bottlenecks to growing life on Mars; the planet has tons of water, but only in the form of ice. (If you melted all that ice, it would create an ocean 100 feet deep across the entire planet!) Similarly, we talked about the dirt. Martian regolith has salts, heavy metals, and perchlorates that are toxic to many organisms. Some microbes on Earth are able to break down these toxins, though, so Pioneer is engineering them to make them better at eating those toxins while adding nutrients back into the soil. This could possibly help support plant life in the future. Watch the full episode and subscribe to @AsimovPress for more. 0:00 A first microbe engineered for Mars 5:03 Simulating Martian chemistry 8:27 The five "pioneer species" 17:20 Water, warming, and nitrogen 26:39 Radiation, growth rates, and poor measurements 35:49 Starship 41:05 Why create a second biosphere?

The first microbe for Mars is a safe, useful first step toward terraforming. Read the announcement from @Pioneer__Labs, including links to three new papers: blog.pioneer-labs.org/p/anno…

It's official: We're back! Asimov Press is returning with a sharper focus on intensive reporting in biotechnology. We're also working with @RenPhilanthropy to build our ideas in the real world. See more: press.asimov.com/articles/ba…

We're looking to add a junior team member to help engineer microbes for Mars. You'd run evolution and functional genomics experiments in non-model microbes. Full-time, in person in Emeryville, CA. We review applications as they arrive. Priority deadline August 26; applications close September 15. Apply: jobs.gusto.com/postings/pion… Our blog: blog.pioneer-labs.org/ Papers and press: pioneer-labs.org/news

Using claude code to directly control a liquid handling robot is such a crazy experience

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: biorxiv.org/content/10.64898…

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 create 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: biorxiv.org/content/10.64898… Retweet if you want more data, and read on if you want to use the library! 🧵

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: biorxiv.org/content/10.64898… 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.