XXXIX CICLO | Del Franco Carmen

On 2023, I achieved the MSc degree in Cellular and Molecular Biology. During my MSc thesis, I’ve been working in the frame of cytogenetic and mutagenesis, studying the effects of the DNA damage after treatment of mammal cells with potentially genotoxic agents, optimizing my skills in using viability tests. After that and once optimized these skills, I have applied for a PhD scholarship in the astrobiology field. Now I am a PhD student working on microbial communities inhabiting rocks in the ice-free areas of Continental Antarctica, where the environmental conditions are similar to the ones described on early Mars. During the next three years, I will acquire several skills, studying the viability of rock microbial communities after exposure to selected stress conditions:
– Cultural tests
– Metabolic tests
– Molecular assays by NGS techniques

The ice-free areas of Antarctica constitute the coldest, driest and most oligotrophic areas on Earth [1]; there, environmental parameters are very similar to the ones described on Mars [2] and for this reason they are accounted as suitable terrestrial Martian analogues [1]. In the antarctic desert, life is not possible except for specialized microbial species colonizing the interstices of porous rocks, adopting cryptoendolithism as a survival strategy [3]. Recent studies, conducted by using next generation sequencing (NGS) techniques [4], allowed a detailed screening of taxonomic, metabolic and functional diversity of these communities that, perpetuating in the long run under Mars-like conditions, are optimal models to investigate the possibility of life on the Red Planet and suggesting that if Mars has ever been colonized, the species living there may have adopted survival strategies similar to the one adopted by terrestrial species before their extinction [5]. The main aim of CRYPTOMARS is to focus on antarctic cryptoendolithic communities as a PROXY to evaluate and understand if and how microbial species may have lived on Mars or Mars-like planets, outlining the adaptations which let them to survive under current or early Mars environmental conditions.

[1] Cary, S. C., McDonald, I. R., Barrett, J. E., & Cowan, D. A. (2010). On the rocks: the microbiology of Antarctic Dry Valley soils. Nature
Reviews Microbiology, 8(2), 129-138.
[2] Preston, L.J.; Dartnell, L.R. Planetary : Lessons learned from terrestrial analogues. Int. J. Astrobiol. 2014, 13, 81–98.
[3] Friedmann, E. The Antarctic cold desert and the search for traces of life on Mars. Adv. Space Res. 1986, 6,265–268.
[4] Claudia Coleine et al.; Antarctic Cryptoendolithic Fungal Communities Are Highly Adapted and Dominated by Lecanoromycetes and
Dothideomycetes, 2018.
[5] Selbmann,L.; De Hoog, G.; Mazzaglia, A.; Friedmann, E.; Onofri, S. Fungi at the edge of life: Cryptoendolithic black fungi from Antarctic
desert. Stud. Mycol. 2005, 51, 1–32.