Life on Mars

Although separated by millions of miles of space, Mars has always held a prime position as a candidate for the existence of life. The reasons behind this speculative interest in Mars might be attributed to the size, position, and the comparability to earth. 

Evidences of life on ''the red planet'' have accumulated over the past years. The Aurora programme was set up by the European Space Agency(ESA) as part of their vision and commitment to the robotic and human exploration of the solar system. The ExoMars mission was planned to be the first major mission, of the Aurora program, to explore life on Mars. This mission will seek to find evidence for organic compounds of biological and non-biological origin at the Martian surface. Subsequently, it was suggested to include the Life Marker Chip (LMC) within the mission that will be launched in 2018.  

The LMC will utilize an immunological-based approach (antibodies) to detect various biomarkers with different chemical classes.  These targets are solely share one point of being with low molecular weight (<1000Da) and therefore, these small molecules (haptens) are always considered to be extremely challenging in term of antibody recognition.    

The main aim of the research project was drawn to develop these antibodies and to characterise them by defining their biochemical relationship to their antigen targets. Consequently, an immunised antibodies library will be constructed utilising various molecular biology techniques, and the antibodies will be displayed using the phage display platform.  

Project Team – Prof Andy Porter, Prof Dave Cullen^#, Dr Keith Charlton^*, Dr Soumya Palliyil, Mohammed Al Qaraghuli

Project Funding – SULSA, BioSKAPE