 Welcome everyone to the February 2024 NASA Night Sky Network member webinar. We are hosting tonight's webinar from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in San Francisco, California. And we are very welcome to, we're very excited to welcome our guest speaker with her talk on astromycology in space exploration. And before we introduce Dr. Martha Simoes, here is Brian Cruz with some announcements. Brian, if you have anything, just let us know. Otherwise, I could do the announcements. I don't have any immediate announcements. We're just all of us here at the ASP are looking forward to the eclipse, as I'm sure all of you are. And I'm very happy to rejoin you after a little bit of a hiatus. So hope to see you again a little more often. Yes, so since you talked about the eclipse, we have five weeks until the total solar eclipse. We are all a buzz here at ASP. If you are a club coordinator of an active club, you should have received an email from us earlier this week or earlier last week, excuse me, regarding eclipse toolkits that will be shipped to you very soon. So please check your inbox from an email, for an email from niceguyinfo at astrosociety.org just to confirm your shipping address. These kits are going to be sent out early March and they should arrive by mid-March just in time for the eclipse. And of course- And Cat, I should mention that about 50 of them went out today and it looks like- Another 50 that are going to go out within the next couple of days. And so that's all we've been doing the last two days is building kits. That's awesome. So yeah, so you heard it first, you're going to get your kits very soon. So with that said, I want to go ahead and just jump right in. If you have any questions, you can always email us at niceguyinfo at astrosociety.org and you can also join our office hours at any time. We have these open three days out of the week now so that this way, if you are a club that has any questions about membership, about logging in, if you have any questions about just updating your page, if you wanted to add something new, you can go ahead and talk to us through our office hours. You schedule a Zoom, the Zoom will be with me and we can talk about anything that's on your mind regarding your club. So for our Zoom attendees, as always, if you have any questions for a guest speaker, make sure that you submit them to the Q&A window and not in the chat. We want to make sure that we see your questions. So this evening, NASA Nightsky, well, this evening, NASA Nightsky Network welcomes Dr. Marta Simois into our February 2024 Nightsky Network webinar. Dr. Marta is a microbiologist who has worked with a myriad of microorganisms and has a multidisciplinary background with a particular focus on mycology. Her work is focused mostly on fungal ecology, biodiversity in environmental analogs to outer space conditions, bio-prospection and application of fungi and fungal growth containment in outer space similar conditions. She graduated in biotechnical engineering and did her master's in clinical microbiology and got her PhD in chemical and biological engineering in Portugal. She then did a postdoc in Saudi Arabia at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology and has worked in the UK at Edge Hill University as a senior biology technician and junior research fellow and an associate tutor. She is currently based in Macau where she is working as an assistant professor on astrobiology at the State Key Laboratory of Lunar and Planetary Sciences located in the Macau University of Science and Technology. Welcome everyone, Dr. Marta. Thank you very much for the nice presentation and nice introduction. Okay, I'm gonna start sharing my slides if that's okay. Okay, oh, give me just a second because I did this before but now I don't see my presentation. Okay, again sharing, here we go. Can you see my presentation? We see it, yeah, we see it now. Okay, perfect. Okay, so, well, for me it's good morning but I'm assuming that for the majority of you it's good afternoon, good night maybe. Regardless, hello, hi. So my name is Marta Philippe Simonge and I'm here to tell you a little bit of the work that I do and hopefully explain you a little bit about the relevance of astromycology in space exploration. Okay, but before I actually start on the topic I'm gonna try and tell you a little bit if I can change the sides, yes, of where I'm coming from and where I'm based at. So I'm currently based at the Macau University of Science and Technology in Macau at the State Key Laboratory of Lunar and Planetary Sciences and this is located in China, in the south of China. And maybe you don't know but Macau used to be a Portuguese colony so there's still a lot of Portuguese influence at the city especially on the old part of the city. There are parts of the city where when you walk in it feels like you're not in Asia but it looks like an European part of the city. You can see that we still have the names of the streets both in Portuguese and Chinese. There's still a lot of influence on architecture, on the food especially but Macau is mostly famous because of its casinos and it's considered to be the Las Vegas of China. And it's actually, well, I don't know exactly how it is at the moment, but before the pandemic even though it was compared to Las Vegas many times it used to make about seven times more profit than Las Vegas so it's quite big. Regarding me myself, so I'm Portuguese so I come from a different place, not Macau. And regarding my background as Kat said before I do have a graduation in biotechnological engineering a master's in clinical microbiology and a PhD in chemical and biological engineering. Sorry, I'm struggling to get, okay, here we go. Of course, this was already explained to you so I started all my training in Portugal, I worked in Saudi Arabia then in UK before coming to Macau. And regarding my background, I've worked with all sorts of microbes. I've worked with mycobacteria which are the causing agents of tuberculosis. I work with mycobacteria phages which are phages, viruses that infect mycobacteria. I work with different sorts of environmental and clinical bacteria but the majority of my work is focused on fungi. Okay, and of course my research is within astrobiology but because I work mostly with fungi then it fits within astromycology and within that I study mostly clinical and environmental applications of fungi. But let's start from the beginning. So I'm assuming that the majority of you know what astrobiology is or have heard about astrobiology and as you probably know, astrobiology tries to answer three major questions which are are we alone? Is life on our planet just a coincidence? Are there any other worlds that might have life? So these are really big questions and we don't have a straightforward answer for them. In fact, we actually need to think of many different things to try to find the answers. So there are many ways to try to find the answers but how can we do this? So we can do this by planning safer and more sustainable missions and by guaranteeing the best conditions for crew members in spacecrafts and even future missions or even bases so that they can do their work better to get the answers that we're looking for. And me, in my case, the way I try to contribute to finding these answers is through astromycology. And maybe some of you have heard of astromycology because some time ago this news, well, not new anymore but Star Trek Discovery was a series that introduced the concept of astromycology and they had a character, an astromycologist that was called Paul Stamets. His name was actually based on a real mycologist and even though this was quite fictional, astromycology is in fact a real science field so it's not just something from Star Trek. It is at the interface between astrobiology and mycology and it studies terrestrial fungi in space. We don't study extraterrestrial fungi even because so far we haven't found life outside our planet but what we do study is the fungi from our planet in space conditions. Okay, and to give you a bit of a background. So regarding fungi, fungi are highly diverse organisms. We have fungi from all different shapes and sizes and from current estimates, we know that there are about 13 million species on our planet. However, depending on the study that you consider, we only know about three to 8% of all of these which means that we still have a lot to explore and a lot to study. We also know regarding fungi that they are essential for the well-being of the terrestrial ecosystems and that they are ubiquitous. However, even though, I've just told you all of this, and even though this is changing now, fungi are still overlooked many times and they're valid and many times ignored but this is a changing scenario. Fungi are becoming more relevant nowadays. Mostly because, well, they are absolute marvels and of course I'm totally biased here but they do a lot of amazing things. They can sequester carbon, they can be great decomposers, they can cause diseases, but they can also provide solutions and medical drugs to cure diseases. Many of them are edible, so direct food sources. Many of them can be used to eliminate pollutants. Many of them are involved in fermentation process, relevant fermentation process. Some are hallucinogenic, some are rain makers, some are toxic. And if you remember the series The Last of Us, that was based on a real fungi, so some of them are actually zombie makers, not humans though. Okay, so they can be nasty, let's say that. They can be our foes because they can produce mycotoxins, they can be the cause of allergic reactions, of course cause spoilage decomposition and they can be the cause of infections in humans and under animals, in plants and also in insects. And they are so, so important that some time ago, like one year ago, more or less, the World Health Organization came up with the fungal priority pathogens list to highlight some of the most important fungi related to human health. And they've listed four species as being quite complex in terms of clinical relevance, and then they had two different groups of species as high risk group and medium risk group. So fungi are now becoming more relevant in several different fields. But they can also be our friends, so it's not just bad news. They can be quite useful because they are responsible for many fermentation process, as I said before. They produce many different metabolites like antibiotics, antifungals, cholesterol lowering drugs. They produce many different enzymes that are quite useful for many different industries. We can use their biomass directly. They can be used as biological control in forestry and agriculture, and even to produce metal nanoparticles. So they are really amazing. Considering all their applications, we have currently fungi being used in many different types of industry. This is just to show you a general picture of how vast their applications can be. And of course they are amazing if we think of the three of life, if we consider the three domains, we actually have fungi belonging to their own kingdom of life. And they're actually the kingdom that is closest to ours. So it's quite interesting. But when it comes to the different types of fungi, even though fungi can be quite diverse, there are many of them, my work tends to focus mostly on filamentous fungi. And these are the ones that we also call molds that form filaments that you see here. These are structures that once they start growing, they form these networks called IFAS. And all the IFAS together end up forming something that we call mycelia. They can form different structures like spores and different things, but they're called filamentous fungi because they form this mycelia. And filamentous fungi, sometimes people think, oh, okay, I've seen something like that somewhere, but people don't usually understand where we might be able to find filamentous fungi. So I guess, do you know where they might be? Okay, of course this is a rhetoric question because I'm not expecting you to answer me directly right now, but do you think you might have filamentous fungi at home? Usually when I ask this question, people go like, oh, no, of course not. And then I ask, but do you have filamentous fungi on you right now? And people go, of course not. No, I took a bath today, come on. But no, the truth is you have filamentous fungi at home, you have filamentous fungi on you because I said before, fungi are ubiquitous and filamentous fungi, they are everywhere. They are on the soil, on plants, on animals, on insects, even on the atmosphere. And they are even on our Earth's atmosphere because they are part of the air particulate matter. And we can even find them on space stations because whenever we go to space, we don't travel alone. So whenever we go somewhere, we take a lot of life widows and filamentous fungi do go with it. Okay, but filamentous fungi, regarding space and space stations, they were initially found on the first space stations and they were responsible for the malfunction of one particular space station, one of the first modular space station, the Russian Mir. And what happened in this space station was that filamentous fungi started growing inside and the IFA started covering all the windings and control panels and started to slowly destroying the structure and it started to malfunction. So this was quite important because it was at this point that people realized that whenever you send something to space, whatever goes to space is not sterile. So that's like the turning point. People started to think, okay, we need to be careful about this and think a little bit better. And this is what you usually see when we have filamentous fungi growing a bit more at home. So when they grow a lot, this is the mycelia that you see. You might have different food sources with it, but you might also have it on your bowls. Here in Macau, for example, this is a very humid area, so we do get a lot of filamentous fungi growing on the different houses and installations. But they don't just look like this. Once you put them under the microscope and you take them to the lab, then that's where you can actually see their beauty because they are quite amazing. When you grow them on petri dishes, they can have all sorts of colors and sizes. And when you look at them under the microscope, under the optical microscope, you can see all these microstructures that differ from species to species. And this is what you'll see with electron microscopy. So they are quite amazing. But why is it important to study astromycology? Well, to start because of planetary protection, mostly because of foreign and backward contamination, and I'll explain this in a minute. And because we do have fungal itch hikers, not just the ones that we take with us that are part of our microbiome, but we also take fungi as resources. So those are the itch hikers that we need to consider. And also another important thing is because we need to develop appropriate cleaning methods and seed disinfectants for space exploration. I'm going to tell you a short story. So one of the major issues that the crew had at the International Space Station was with mold growing on some rooms, especially the rooms where the astronauts would do gymnastics. This happened because they sweated a lot in those rooms. So the humidity increased in there which favored the growth of fungi and they started to have a lot of growth of fungi on the walls of those rooms. So they actually spent, and they do this still as part of their routines, a lot of cleaning, scrubbing, and just making sure that they don't get all the environment contaminated. But the important thing is when we're talking about, for example, space stations, you cannot just spray some disinfectant because once you spray something inside a space station because the environment inside has microgravity, if you spray something, the spray will go everywhere. And if it will grow everywhere, then the health of the astronauts won't be very good because of that. So that is one of the issues. Just going back just to explain you what forward and backward contamination is. So forward contamination is when we take something from our planet somewhere else. Backward contamination is the opposite when we're talking about bringing something from somewhere else into our own planet. And fungi can, of course, be forward contamination, and they can even be backward contamination because once you take a fungi to an extraterrestrial location, once you bring it back, especially if it's changed somehow, it will be a backward contamination. Okay, but moving on. So another important thing of studying us from my college is to guarantee safer future missions, to avoid the degradation and contamination of the spacecraft, stations, structures, and, of course, to avoid infections and diseases of crew members and also to guarantee sustainable missions. This last part is quite important because if you think of especially the long-term missions, you cannot take everything from our planet. And fungi can actually produce a lot of things, especially medical drugs. So for the long-term missions, because you're not going to have a pharmacy just around the corner, it is much more useful to have something that can actually produce several different drugs. So instead of taking a lot of weight, if you take some species to develop the compounds that you want to produce in space, then you end up decreasing the payload. And by decreasing the payload, you decrease the amount of fuel that you need, which means that you'll get much cheaper and sustainable missions. Okay, and of course, we know that, for example, our human body suffers many different adaptations once it is in outer space conditions. We know that, for example, for us, the bone size decreases, cell proliferation decreases, and then we have things like increased alterations of the bone marrow. So our immune system changes once we are exposed to space conditions. But this is something that doesn't happen just to us. Whatever organisms we take with us, those also suffer adaptations. And this is the same that happens to fungi. So fungi also adapt to environmental stress conditions. They can change their gene regulation. They can change their enzymatic activity and the secondary metabolite production. They can become more pathogenic. They can change their toxogenic or microtexogenic profile. So they can produce more things. They can produce different things. So we need to understand exactly what happens so that we know what to count with and to make sure that we're not putting ourselves at risk. Okay, but how do we study astromycology? This maybe it's not so obvious for the majority of you, but what we do is we study fungal species from our own planet, of course, and we analyze any fungal adaptations to any stress conditions that might be similar to outer space conditions. And then of course we exploit selected fungal species and their products for space exploration. Like for example, improved infrastructures, improved materials, better production of different products. And of course, regarding my own research, it involves several different parts. And now I'm gonna tell you about what I do just to give you an idea of how astromycology can be researched. But there's many other different things out there. Okay, so in my research, one of the things that I do on a regular basis is field sampling in analog environments. So there are many different types of analog environments on our planet. And from time to time, we do research and we do collect samples from different ones. If you're not aware terrestrial analogs, these are specific locations on our planet that have some characteristics that are similar in some ways to other locations outside our planet. And of course, terrestrial analogs are necessary to search life beyond our planet, to define habitable environments in other places, and to use as reference of extreme environments and survival strategies. Okay, this is just a map showing you the location of many analog sites, but there are currently more. And still going back to my research. So what I do when I collect these samples from these terrestrial analogs, I do isolation of fungi, I do identification and characterization of new species and sometimes not new species, but new strains. And then I studied those fungi and even also reference fungi, not just the isolated ones. And I expose them to conditions that are common to outer space environments. And these conditions can be several things. So they can be, for example, microgravity, which we do using the Klinostats, which is this equipment here, or expose them to hypergravity using the large diameter centrifuge as you see here. Or these can be high salinity or presence of artificial regulates, high and low temperatures, or even under vacuum. And then I do these exposures. Sometimes I couple several different parameters. Sometimes I do single parameter and then I analyze several different things regarding those fungi. So first I always analyze morphological traits. For some of the different works, I study the genetic stability. I do a lot of work with the production of metal nanoparticles. And I also study the enzymatic profiles and secondary metabolite profiles. This is just, if you want to check it later, some examples of published research. But I'm gonna tell you about some of the undergoing projects, just to give you a better idea of the work that is going on over here. So one of the projects that I'm involved is located, is a collaboration with the Jean-Pierre University from Cape Verde and involves, involved already because this already happened, the collection of samples from sultans from three different islands. Cape Verde is a group of islands in Africa. And we went to three of them. And we went there because there's a lot of environments here that have not been explored. And they do have a lot of sultans, hyper-sailing environments in these three islands. And sultans can be studied as Mars analogs. So that's why we focused on them. So they can be used as Mars analogs because they are quite airy, they have high solar radiates, they have high salinity, they have increased temperature and oxidation. So they have unique life developing in there. And here, what I'm showing, it doesn't really show and doesn't really tell how it looks, but this is the Saltern of Pedridluma. It's in Salt Island. And this is located inside an extinct volcano crater. It's quite amazing. And of course, the sultans, they have a lot of pink lakes filled with amazing life forms. Okay, this is some of the work, but I'm not gonna tell you about that. Just pointing out that there are different types of sultans, some of them are not in use anymore, but they're still exist. And none of this has been explored regarding microbial life. So there's still a lot to study. One other project that I'm involved in has to do with the development of a low-cost technology for drinking water disinfection. And this can be quite relevant for closed water systems, especially in space stations. However, this technology and the majority of the technology source space application, they are directly transferable to our own planet applications. For this project, the goal is to use marine filamentous fungi and have them produce metal nanoparticles and then try to use those to develop the drinking water disinfection. This is a project that is in collaboration with Portugal and Brazil. For the production of metal nanoparticles, this is something that is part of my work. The production is something that is not very complex. It's something quite simple. So just to give you an idea of how the production is made, usually what you do is you grow the fungi in petri dishes, you cut plugs of the grown fungi and you let them grow in liquid media. Then you recover the biomass and once it's growing at the exponential phase, you put the biomass growing only in water and then you leave it for a couple more days and then you recover not the biomass this time, but the water and the water is filled with all the secondary metabolites that the fungi started to excrete. Once you have the supernatant without the biomass, you add a chemical precursor and then you immediately have the formation of the metal nanoparticles. So the process itself is not very complex. And of course, this is something quite useful because producing metal nanoparticles with fungi is something simple, fast, cheap. It doesn't need any complex equipment and it can even be used for different types of things and even be considered for in-sito resource applications. Okay, still on metal nanoparticles, so they are quite useful because nowadays they are used in many different things for many different applications and moving on to different projects. One other project that I'm working on is another collaboration with Portugal and also Spain and Cape Verde. It's focused on saline environments. So in Cape Verde, we're still exploring the salterns for this and in this project, the goal is to check the biodiversity and look for species, microbial species that are producers of biosurfactants. This is just to show you some images so you've seen before the salterns from Cape Verde. One of the other locations that we're exploring is Lake Titiz in Spain and it looks like this. And once you get closer to the soil, you have these plaques of salt. So this place is a really nice analogue for the salt deposits of Mars and also to the briny ocean of Europa. I'm assuming you all know but just in case you don't, Europa is the moon that orbits Jupiter and it has an icy surface. That's why it's called an icy moon. And under the surface, there's a salty water ocean that we think that contains twice as much water as the Earth's oceans combined. Okay, but moving on. Another project is focused on the study of sapras in Abu Dhabi. Sapras are a different type of environment. So these are coastal environments where the different areas are exposed on a regular basis to different gradients of light, of salinity, of humidity, of solar radiation. And all the life that exists there is highly adapted to these constant changes in the parameters. So we're studying the biodiversity there. A different project is called Medical and Biotechnological Potential of Fund Drive for Space Exploration. And in this, the goal was to study fungal species, expose them to artificial regalates, both Martian and lunar regalates, and then screen them for their biotechnological profiles for the production of enzymes and check the clinical risks. This is a project that was focused on Diformic fungi. These are a specific type of fungi that can grow either in the form of filamentous fungi or in the form of yeasts. And this depends on which temperature they are growing at. So if they grow around 25 and 30 degrees, which is the temperature that they find on the soil, for example, then they grow as filaments, they form the mycelia. But if they manage to enter, for example, the human body where we have higher temperature, once they reach the temperatures of 35 to 37 degrees, then they change their morphology into a yeast form and they become pathogenic. So the idea for this project was to expose these specific types of fungi to the different conditions and just check if the change from filamentous into yeast would happen faster or not. If it happened faster than we could infer that they would become more pathogenic, meaning that if we took them for space exploration, once they'd be exposed to Martian, lunar regalates, then they might become more dangerous to us. A different project has to do with the fungal exposure to Martian and lunar regalates coupled with simulated microgravity. For this project, the idea was to detect the potential clinical risks and to evaluate the production of metal nanoparticles, specifically titanium dioxide nanoparticles and silver nanoparticles. So for this project, to simulate the microgravity we used a 3D climate stat, as I've shown you before, which is this equipment here. And if you don't have an idea, what we do is, this is the part of the equipment that we usually fit inside an incubator and then we let the fungi grow in their wall, they are set in these stages and it keeps on turning into several different, it's almost like a small centrifuge, but that allows us to mimic microgravity. And of course, metal nanoparticles can be constituted by many different novel metals, magnetic metals, semiconductors, but we focused here on titanium dioxide and silver nanoparticle for the production. As I've shown you before, the production process is similar. The main difference in order to get different types of nanoparticles is to have a different chemical precursor. That's what makes it either into silver nanoparticles, golden nanoparticles, or whichever you want to produce. So for this specific case, we actually found that once we exposed the fungi, when once we had the metal nanoparticles produced, we noticed that under simulated microgravity, they changed shape. So we started to have triangular and square-like shaped metal nanoparticles, and this is quite relevant because we usually get round nanoparticles under regular gravity, but if we have different shapes, then we might explore different applications. We also noticed that under microgravity, the majority of the nanoparticles were smaller, and usually smaller nanoparticles are better for clinical applications because they end up having higher antimicrobial capacities. Okay, one other project had to do with the study of HEDNO-HES to do with the fungal biofilm formation on Martian and lunar regolith. If you don't know, regolith is usually like sand, so something very dusty, very grainy, but we wanted to check biofilm formation, but for you to check biofilm formation, you need a smooth surface because that's where usually biofilms form. So for us to have a smooth surface, what we did was we created these blocks of resin epoxy where we included several different parts, the bigger parts of the regoliths, and then we just made the surface very, very smooth in order to get a clear surface to get biofilm formation. And for us to study this in liquid-broth, what we did was we taped the plugs at the bottom of Erlan Myers. So for this study, we ended up using several different regoliths, lunar and Martian ones, and then we analyzed the biofilm formation, we checked the protein concentration, and we tried to compare all the different growths of fungi with just the regolith. So we don't see obvious changes, not on the growth, but if you compare slightly, so this is day one, day two, three, four, five, if you compare for example day four under normal gravity with hypergravity, there's a slight increase of biomass, okay? It's not very obvious here, these pictures are very small, but there is. And then what we do see are differences regarding the proteins, but we're still, this is still an ongoing project, so we're still trying to figure this out and figuring out what this means and how do they really change under these conditions, and if it does affect the production of biofilms or not. Again, keep in mind that biofilms are quite important because we don't want them to form in water, for example, because if you have a biofilm, a fungal biofilm forming in a closed water system in a space station, for example, then it might ruin having all the water contaminated, so this can be quite important. Another project that is still going on has to do with medical and biotechnological potential of fungi in hypergravity for space exploration. For this, what we do is we check, we expose fungi in hypergravity and we use the large diameter centrifuge that looks like this, and then we just put our samples inside these red gondolas and then we expose it for some time and let them grow in there, and then we analyze them. And you might think, but why hypergravity? Because of course, microgravity, it exists on space stations, it makes sense. Why hypergravity? Well, because hypergravity has been reported as a stimulant for certain cells, so we know that, but it has not been explored for other life forms or for general life forms, and we also know that all microbial chikers, anything that goes through a lunch is exposed to hypergravity during the lunches, so we actually need to understand if hypergravity can actually affect or not, and if we can explore it somehow. Okay, if you want to know a little bit more about HyperGest, this is a program between the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs and the European Space Agency. This is something that a lot of people can apply for just to have the chance to use the facilities and use the large diameter centrifuge. Okay, I'll leave this information here just in case you want to check it later. But for this project, what we wanted to do is basically compare what happens to fungi once they are exposed to hypergravity, and what we did was we exposed it to 10G and 15G, and we didn't know what to aim for because there is, I think, there's just maybe one study with fungi on hypergravity, so we didn't know if fungi could hold hypergravity well or not, so we chose 10G and 15G but without any references. And the truth is that fungi grow without any issue. They don't care about hypergravity. They develop really well. And then our idea is now to compare the samples that were exposed to 10G, 15G, and to samples grown in microgravity and see what exactly are the differences. So from all the things that I've been telling you, of course, at this point, you already understand that what I do is expose fungi then explore and check them on several different aspects. For the case of the 3D clinostat, this is how we set the experiment. So if we grow them in liquid broth, we usually fill falcon tubes with them. We set them on the stage like this and then let it work. For the large diameter centrifuge, we set everything inside the red gondulas. And in here you have a setting that allows the production of the metal nanoparticles directly under hypergravity, but you can just put petri dishes inside the gondulas or even Erlenmeyers and let them grow for how long you want you to do your own experiments. Okay, and as an overview. Okay, so fungi are amazing. They have an amazing diversity. They can be our friends and foes. They are highly relevant under the space context, but still understudied. And of course, I'm biased on this, but I do believe that astromycology is expected to provide major contributions to astrobiology, space biotechnology, Mars exploration, space exploration, and also in Cedar resource utilization. I do believe that astromycology has several main focuses regarding different species. So it will focus on, it will and it is focusing on common fungal species that are usually found in space exploration structures, like space stations, spacecrafts, on the common fungal species that are part of our human microbiome, on fungal species that are currently showing alterations under climate change scenario. And this is something that we can study and compare because fungi are basically being exposed to different conditions and they are adapting to it. And they are even becoming more pathogenic. This is the case of many new emergent pathogens like Candida auris. So we do need to understand what will happen if we expose them to the different conditions in space. Other focuses are of course the species of the World Health Organization priority list, any biotechnological relevant species for processes on Earth that can be directly transferable for spaces application. And of course, just to finalize, I would like to thank well, all the funding agencies, my small but amazing research group here, the astrobiology team at the state key laboratory of Lunar and Planetary Sciences, well, and all my collaborators. This is, I know that you don't see names, but I think it's always nicer to show faces. There are more, but these are the ones currently at work with me. And more funding agencies, and that's it for now. Do you have any questions? Thank you. Thank you so much for that presentation, Martha. Yeah, fungi are beautiful and terrifying and they're incredible. I totally agree with you. Okay, I see that we have a few questions. Yeah, we do have a few questions in the chat, so we'll go ahead and we'll work through them. So working with fungi sounds dangerous. How do you protect personnel against infection? Okay, so different species have different risk level. And in microbiology, you have species with bio-azard level one, two, three, it goes up to four. In our labs, we work with species with hazard risk up to two only. So that's already a limiting factor. We don't work with very, very dangerous species, but we do have to take all the precautions and these have to do with general microbiology lab practices. Of course, we wear all the safety equipment that we need. We work on a level two laboratory, which is a specific room with particular characteristics to avoid contaminations and infections. And of course, no one goes into the work without previous training just to make sure that we're always cleaning, disinfectant, wearing gloves, goggles, you know, taking all the precautions necessary to avoid any issues. Okay, so our next question is about fungi and Europa. So, you know, Europa orbit, Jupiter is very strong within very strong radiation belt. Can fungi withstand the level of radiation or would it become more virulent? This is a very interesting question. So fungi, not all species, but some species can withstand, can survive and even drive in really high levels of radiation. But they see species dependent and sometimes even strain dependent. So within the same species, you might have strains that are better adapted to certain conditions than others. But fungi, they are really, really amazing in that sense because some species, they can be really, really okay with high radiation. It's amazing, especially the black fungi because black fungi tend to have a component on their composition called melanin and that makes them dark. So they are able to survive through high radiation much easier than others. Excellent. And another question we had is, can we build stable structures from mycelium mat? So what would be the strengths or downfalls of this? Yes, we can. There's a couple of research groups working on this and there's even different companies trying to develop products with this. And of course, they have many really amazing aspects about it because if you use something organic and if it's something that you can actually grow in situ, then again, you'll be needing less, to take less resources once you have a space mission. So if you have a smaller payload, again, you'll need less fuel. So the mission will be cheaper and much more sustainable. Plus, using certain components might be actually very complex and very difficult. So if you think of structures on our planet, the majority of the house facilities, they are based on cement. Cement can be quite expensive. So if you can replace cement structures with something based on fungal mycelium, that would be amazing, much more sustainable. That sounds awesome. So we do have another few questions. So do you think, given what happened with Mir in the 90s and 2000s, into the 2000s, do you think it would be a good idea to grow fungi, mushrooms for food consumption on spacecraft or on space stations? Yes, I do. So different species have different risks associated, of course. Not all species are the composers, not all species do exactly what happened on Mir, but even those, they can be explored because it's a matter of containing what you're taking and also understanding well enough if once you take them and once they are exposed to either the radiation, the microgravity, whatever, you need to understand if they're going to behave one way or the other. So we need to know beforehand if they will become more dangerous or more useful. But yes, having fungi as a food source is an amazing alternative that, again, will decrease payloads, decrease the money involved in space missions, so what's not to like about it? Yes, I do think it would be great. Excellent, and then we did have a question from YouTube and this is actually a question about a paper that you co-authored in 2020. Could you be more specific as to the applications of MNPs? Okay. Biogenic metal nanoparticles. Yes, so metal nanoparticles, they have many different, I'm not sure this is a very general question. So metal nanoparticles, they can be used for many different things. The majority of the applications has to do with their antimicrobial capacity. So metal nanoparticles can be used to avoid microbial growth. That's why you have, for example, during the pandemic, you had many masks that had metal nanoparticles on them because it avoided microbial growth, for example, and you have surfaces that have metal nanoparticles incorporated, again, to avoid microbial growth, or you even have textiles that nowadays have metal nanoparticles incorporated, again, to avoid microbial growth. So one of the uses for this is, for example, in socks to avoid fungal infections on feet. If you have socks with metal nanoparticles incorporated, you decrease the probability of having fungal infections, for example. But there are many other applications I showed. I can show again one slide that was related to the different applications. Let me just go back, bear with me a little bit. Okay, so this, for example, shows a bit because there are more applications, but this shows a bit of the most important ones. I spoke about the clinical ones and the textile industry, but there's a lot of different things where metal nanoparticles are currently being used that for biosensors in agriculture or as anti-cancer. So there's many, many different applications depending on what type of metal nanoparticles you're using, how they are, what's their characteristics, their size, their shape. All of this allows you to have different applications. I'm not sure if this was the answer that they were hoping for, but you can always reach me later. No, okay. So now I just have a fun question for you. Given that you work in this industry, do you happen to have a favorite mushroom as a food? Oh, okay. So I do like mushrooms, but there's one thing I don't work with mushrooms. I work with filamentous fungi. So I work with the mold, the dusty things. So it's not exactly the mushrooms that I work with in the lab, but on my plate, I like all of them. So I don't have a favorite one. Do you have a favorite one though? Because I see pictures of mushrooms behind you. Thank you so much, Brian. Did you have any questions for our speaker? Well, I was just kind of watching this and I started pondering about cryptobiotic crusts in desert regions and how they really are essential to the ecosystems there. And then I was kind of pondering about the ability of our rovers and spacecraft to potentially detect these. And obviously the rovers on Mars aren't constructed to do that. But what is the prospectus of looking for these sorts of cryptobiotic crusts on other planets? Which of course would be an indication of life and certainly on our planet is a dominantly filamentous bacteria and fungi. Well, that could be something for several hours but just to make it short. Okay, so if we do consider that there's life out there and we haven't found it, the highest probability is that it's gonna be a simpler life forms. And if we think of bacteria and fungi, so bacteria are prokaryotes while fungi are eukaryotes. So fungi are a bit more complex in all sorts in terms of cell structure, in terms of physiology, of needs, of adaptations, they're more complex. So it's not very probable that there will be life forms similar to fungi. But of course, we still haven't found anything so we don't know. But yeah, I don't know. However, and now I'm changing it because of it. If we do set bases on the moon, which are now planned actually, if we get to do bases on Mars, we're going to try to develop our own structures, food sources there. And if you're trying to grow, for example, plants, you cannot have plants without fungi because plants are highly dependent on fungi to grow and develop and develop. So all of this is related to something else. You cannot look at one thing on its own. There's always a much bigger picture and even though, for example, I told you about my own research and I look into these tiny little bits of the story, the big thing has many other factors involved. So I'm studying this, but a lot of people are studying different parts of life that might actually help and complement what I do. And then at the end, we might be able to put everything together and realize that what we look at, the information that we already have from Mars, from Europe might actually be showing us something different. It's just that sometimes we don't know how to recognize the patterns that we have in front of us. I know that I went a different way and I didn't give you a straight answer, sorry. Well, it's fascinating, you know, because, you know, those crusty go to desert regions and they go, no, there's no life here. And yet you need to be very careful. The soils are very delicate there and they're very susceptible to damage and it's because of that, you know, the microbiota that's present. Yeah, yeah. On a regular basis, when we come across different extreme environments in our own planet, the first idea is always, oh, this looks empty of life. There's nothing living in here. When we found the first deep brines in the oceans, we thought, no, there's nothing living in there. Nothing, no, nothing alive. I do thermal vents. No, there's nothing alive on them. They don't have the regular characteristics for life to develop. And nowadays we know that life is amazing. It kind of developed in all the worst places, extreme environments. So we don't know what's happening over there. We need to study more and more. Okay, do we have any other questions? No, I think that that is it. Thank you so much, Marta, for joining us, spending your time with us here at Night Sky Network. For our Zoom attendees, there is a survey link that has been posted to the chat. As always, we appreciate your comments, questions, feedback, suggestions. You can find this webinar along with past webinars on the Night Sky Network YouTube channel. And as of right now, we are still working on getting a March guest speaker, and we will email everyone as soon as we have one secured. And that is all for this evening. Keep looking up and we will see you all next month. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. If anyone has questions later on, these are my contacts, feel free to reach me. It was great to be here. Thank you very much. Thank you.