UK Centre for Astrobiology, School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK.
Microb Biotechnol. 2022 Jan;15(1):29-41. doi: 10.1111/1751-7915.13927. Epub 2021 Sep 17.
The establishment of a permanent human settlement in space is one of humanity's ambitions. To achieve this, microorganisms will be used to carry out many functions such as recycling, food and pharmaceutical production, mining and other processes. However, the physical and chemical extremes in all locations beyond Earth exceed known growth limits of microbial life. Making microbes more tolerant of a greater range of extraterrestrial extremes will not produce organisms that can grow in unmodified extraterrestrial environments since in many of them not even liquid water can exist. However, by narrowing the gap, the engineering demands on bioindustrial processes can be reduced and greater robustness can be incorporated into the biological component. I identify and describe these required microbial biotechnological modifications and speculate on long-term possibilities such as microbial biotechnology on Saturn's moon Titan to support a human presence in the outer Solar System and bioprocessing of asteroids. A challenge for space microbial biotechnology in the coming decades is to narrow the microbial gap by systemically identifying the genes required to do this and incorporating them into microbial systems that can be used to carry out bioindustrial processes of interest.
在太空中建立永久性人类住区是人类的一大目标。为此，微生物将被用于执行许多功能，如回收、食品和药品生产、采矿和其他过程。然而，地球以外所有地点的物理和化学极端条件都超出了已知微生物生命的生长极限。使微生物更能耐受更大范围的外星极端条件，并不能产生能够在未经改良的外星环境中生长的生物，因为在许多环境中甚至不存在液态水。然而，通过缩小差距，可以降低生物工业过程的工程需求，并将更大的稳健性纳入生物组成部分。我确定并描述了这些所需的微生物生物技术改造，并推测了长期的可能性，例如在土星的卫星泰坦上进行微生物生物技术，以支持人类在外太阳系的存在和小行星的生物加工。未来几十年太空微生物生物技术的一个挑战是通过系统地确定实现这一目标所需的基因，并将其纳入可用于执行感兴趣的生物工业过程的微生物系统中，从而缩小微生物差距。
