Martian Homegrown

Just down the road at NC State, researchers are working on designing gritty, bad-assed plants to grow on Mars.

Take the cold tolerance of bacteria that thrive in arctic ice, add the ultraviolet resistance of tomato plants growing high in the Andes mountains, and combine with an ordinary plant. What do you get? A tough plant "pioneer" that can grow in Martian soil. [...] The plants would probably be housed in a greenhouse on a Martian base, because no known forms of life can survive direct exposure to the Martian surface, with its extremely cold, thin air and sterilizing radiation. Even then, conditions in a Martian greenhouse would be beyond what ordinary plants could stand. During the day, the plants would have to endure high levels of solar ultraviolet radiation, because the thin Martian atmosphere has no ozone to block it like the Earth's atmosphere does. At night, temperatures would drop well below freezing. Also, the Martian soil is poor in the mineral nutrients necessary for plants to thrive.

The team uses the techniques of gene splicing to remove useful genes from extremophiles and add them to plants. [...] To prove their concept, the team took a gene from "Pyrococcus furiosus," a microbe that lives in the scalding water issuing from deep sea vents, and inserted it into a tobacco cells. The gene, "superoxide reductase," removes toxic oxygen atoms and molecules that are generated in organisms under stress. The gene was successfully incorporated into the tobacco cells and functioned without harming them. The team plans to transform plants with genes for cold tolerance as the next step in their research.

In other news, the Mars Global Surveyor, orbiting Mars since 1997, snapped a blurry photo of the Mars Odyssey craft (in orbit since 2001), marking the first time one spacecraft orbiting a foreign planet has taken a picture of another. Down on the surface, while the Opportunity rover has been stuck in the sand for about a month, moving less than a foot, the Spirit rover "has finally found the kind of geology you can really sink your teeth into."