During the past couple months I’ve been thinking and writing a lot about space colonies for some reason, and I recently had the pleasure of talking with a group of iGEM students that spent last summer designing synthetic microbes that would help astronauts build a community on Mars. The Brown-Stanford joint team worked with NASA scientists on a two-pronged project. Their first project, REGObricks, uses bacteria to break down urea into chemicals that can be used to form crystals that can bond Martian sand into a strong building material. The second project is PowerCell–engineering photosynthetic bacteria that can convert sunlight into the chemical energy (like sugar) needed to power other living things. Their short teaser video is a great introduction to their team:
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