Over the past decade, the NASA Astrobiology Institute funded Michigan State University geomicrobiologist Matt Schrenk’s lab to study life in the extreme environment of groundwater in a highly alkaline aquifer near Lower Lake, California. Because similar environments occur in space — in the subsurface of Mars and in the oceans of Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus — the microorganisms found in this aquifer, and their behavior, may provide insight into potential extraterrestrial life.
Two former MSU Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences graduate students, Lindsay Putman and Mary Sabuda, have recently published papers on this research. They collaborated at the same field site, which is characterized by serpentinization, a process where iron-rich rock reacts with water to form serpentine minerals and releases reduced gases like hydrogen and methane.
Putman’s research, published in mSystems, presents a community assembly model — an ecological approach that studies the makeup and number of microbial species in a location to explain the processes that drive changes in their composition over space and time. From 2011 – 2017, Putman and her colleagues took samples from the bottom of the six wells a few times a year.
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