Daniela Billi

TL;DR: The removal of water through air drying damages membranes, proteins and nucleic acids and is lethal to the majority of organisms, but some vegetative cells of bacteria and cyanobacteria survive extreme desiccation and hold promise for the metabolic engineering of desiccence-sensitive cells.

TL;DR: Under the intense martian UV flux the morphological signatures of life can persist even after viability, enzymatic activity, and pigmentation have been destroyed, showing implications for the survival of diverse microbial contaminants dispersed during the course of human exploratory class missions on the surface of Mars.

TL;DR: Insights are given into how and why cyanobacteria could play a role in the development of self-sustainable manned outposts on Mars, and a wide range of life-support biological processes based on Martian resources.

TL;DR: The presented BIOMEX concept could be scaled up to future exposure experiments on the Moon and will serve as a pretest in low Earth orbit.