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Synthetic Biology for Terraformation: Lessons from Mars, Earth and the Microbiome

Submitted:

28 December 2019

Posted:

29 December 2019

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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.
Keywords: 
terraformation; Mars; evolution; microbiome; synthetic biology; drylands; hypercycles; restoration ecology
Subject: 
Biology and Life Sciences  -   Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
Copyright: This open access article is published under a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license, which permit the free download, distribution, and reuse, provided that the author and preprint are cited in any reuse.

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