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Jet Herrington-Brown from the School of Life Sciences will present a seminar on her URSS summer project: "Exploring the extraterrestrial growth potential of phototrophic biofilms and its implications"

Abstract

Astrobiology, or xenobiology, is the study of 'life's origins and the potential of life in the universe'. It is something that has interested me for over a quarter of my life. The borders in which 'life' exists are tentative and are formed using terrestrial knowledge. The nature of astrobiology as a discipline is largely experimental and uses assumptions to form theories—if an organism thrives on Earth under certain conditions, we can hypothesise that under similar conditions, organisms could 'live' on other celestial bodies. This forms the basis of this experiment, where Lunar and Martian simulants were used to mimic planetary environments and tests the growth of complex algal communities in their presence.