Preprint Article Version 1 Preserved in Portico This version is not peer-reviewed

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

Nuria Conde-Pueyo
,
Blai Vidiella Rocamora
* ORCID logo ,
Josep Sardanyes
,
Miguel Berdugo
,
Fernando Maestre
,
Victor de Lorenzo
,
Ricard Sole
Version 1 : Received: 28 December 2019 / Approved: 29 December 2019 / Online: 29 December 2019 (13:23:07 CET)

A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.

Conde-Pueyo, N.; Vidiella, B.; Sardanyés, J.; Berdugo, M.; Maestre, F.T.; De Lorenzo, V.; Solé, R. Synthetic Biology for Terraformation Lessons from Mars, Earth, and the Microbiome. Life 2020, 10, 14. Conde-Pueyo, N.; Vidiella, B.; Sardanyés, J.; Berdugo, M.; Maestre, F.T.; De Lorenzo, V.; Solé, R. Synthetic Biology for Terraformation Lessons from Mars, Earth, and the Microbiome. Life 2020, 10, 14.

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 is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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