Ancient microbes can help in finding traces of alien life, new study suggests

The urge to understand alien life is something that has fascinated scientists for a long time. There have been a number of processes implemented by scientists when it comes to understanding the workings of various other planetary environments and it looks like the study of microbes can be the answer to their questions. According to latest research, microbes contain proteins which are capable of retaining atmospheric information for a long period of time and that was used by scientists to understand how Earth was during its initial period. The microbes date back to millions of years ago and scientists believe that a similar study can help them in finding possible traces of alien life.

“Early Earth is an alien environment compared to our world today. Understanding how organisms here have changed with time and in different environments is going to teach us crucial things about how to search for and recognize life elsewhere,” Edward Schwieterman, a University of California, Riverside astrobiologist, wrote in a study describing the research and its possible uses.

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The study looked at how microbes adapted to the scarcity of oxygen as well as the absence of the ozone layer during that period and this can be used to find out about other habitable planets.

“On early Earth, energy may have been very scarce. Bacteria and archaea figured out how to use the plentiful energy from the sun without the complex biomolecules required for photosynthesis,”

“Life as we know it is as much an expression of the conditions on our planet as it is of life itself. We resurrected ancient DNA sequences of one molecule, and it allowed us to link to the biology and environment of the past,” said University of Wisconsin-Madison astrobiologist Betul Kacar.