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The innovative instrument developed by the University of Hawaii at Mānoa could be a key part of NASA’s future missions to find life — existing or extinct — on Earth and other planets.
The tool, called the Compact Color Biofinder, uses a special camera to scan a large area for fluorescence signals of biological materials such as amino acids, fossils, sedimentary rocks, plants, microbes, proteins and lipids. It was used to detect this biosynthetic detritus in fish fossils from the Green River rock formations in Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah.
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The results have been published in Natural Scientific Reports.
“Biofinder is the first system of its kind,” Anupam Misra, tool developer and principal investigator at hawaii institute of geophysics and planetary science of UH-Manoa College of Marine and Earth Science and Technology, in a press release. “Currently, no other equipment can detect small amounts of biodebris in rocks during the day. Additional advantages of the Biofinder are that it can operate from several meters away, capture video clips, and can scan large areas quickly.”
Misra and his colleagues applied for the opportunity to send the Biofinder on a future NASA mission. The search for life elsewhere in the galaxy is a major goal of exploration missions by NASA and other international space agencies.
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“If the Biofinder were mounted on a rover on Mars or another planet, we would be able to quickly scan large areas to find evidence of past life, even if the organisms were small, not easily seen with our eyes and died for millions of years. years,” Misra told a Press Release: “We anticipate that fluorescence imaging will be of great importance in future NASA missions to find organic matter and the presence of life on other planetary bodies.”
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The Biofinder capability will be critical to the accurate and non-invasive detection of contaminants such as microbes or extraterrestrial biological hazards to or from Earth, according to Sonya Rowley, the team’s biologist and co-author of the study.
“The discovery of such a biomarker would be groundbreaking evidence for life beyond Earth,” Misra said in a press release.
Finding evidence of biological remains over large areas of the planet presents a formidable challenge. The team tested the detection capabilities of the Biofinder on ancient fish fossils in the Green River Formation and confirmed the results with laboratory spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy, and lifetime microscopy.
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“There are some unknowns about how quickly bio-waste is replaced by minerals in the fossilization process,” Misra said in a press release. “However, our findings confirm once again that biological residues can live for millions of years, and the use of biofluorescence imaging effectively detects these trace residues in real time.”
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