Light is the fundamental energy source for photosynthesis, enabling the synthesis of organic compounds. Over billions of years, photosynthetic organisms have profoundly transformed our planet into a diverse global ecosystem (1,2). Therefore, understanding an (exo)planet in the context of its stellar environment is an essential step in assessing its habitability. K-dwarf stars have gained a lot...
Astrobiological studies are fundamental to understanding how extraterrestrial environments might alter the survivability of complex biological systems. An optimal biological model for space research would need to lower its metabolic rate, possess enhanced defenses against the space environment, and be able to survive prolonged periods of space flight [1]. The crustacean Artemia salina has...
Enceladus’s subsurface global ocean (1) can be probed by sampling the gaseous and icy material the moon expels into its cryovolcanic plume and - even further out - into Saturn’s E ring (2,3,4,5). Hydrothermal outflows supported by tidal heating (4,5,6), together with rich organic chemistry (7,8) imply that the moon appears to be one of most habitable places in our solar system. Among the...
A rhythmic pattern of motion due to breathing and circulation processes is observed within macroscopic organisms such as animals. The question is whether we could observe something like this – on a much smaller scale – also in microbial life forms. We know that there is motion within any type of cell from the myriad of internal processes and also at the cell boundaries when an organism...
Cyanobacteria are ubiquitous in the world. They have successfully colonised both land and sea and were the first to oxygenate the atmosphere in what is known as the Great Oxidation Event (GOE) (1). Cyanobacteria are also the only prokaryotes capable of photosynthesis and are considered a pre-evolutionary stage of today's chloroplasts (2). This is predicted on the endosymbiont theory, which...
