Collecting Diverse Microorganisms from Rover Spacecraft

. The Planetary Protection discipline at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory develops and implements procedures to prevent both forward and backward contamination between the Earth and solar system bodies. However, there will always be some microorganisms that will be resistant to the strictest of sterilization methods. In order understand the microorganisms found on spacecraft during assembly, and to rapidly identify them, a mass spectrometry approach was developed. As an experimental approach, a custom database was created for a subset of microorganisms in the Planetary Protection Archive. In order to make the database as accurate and efficient as possible, several different procedures have been developed on how to identify and classify each isolate within the database. Building upon previous research in the area, we designed a method characterizing revived isolates with known 16SrRNA gene sequence OTUs (Operational Taxonomy Units) to create MSPs (Mass Spectral Profiles) and RTCs (Real Time Classifications) using MALDI-TOF Mass Spectroscopy. We will use these profiles to enhance the Planetary Protection custom classification database, for immediate and future investigations. This work was carried out at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology