News July 2021

Recently published 3 hopefully important papers :

Antonin Affholder, François Guyot, Boris Sauterey, Régis Ferrière and Stéphane Mazevet (2021) Bayesian analysis of Enceladus’ plume data to assess methanogenesis. Nature Astronomy, 2021/6/7, 1-10

What I find important in this article, beyond the quantitative estimation of the likelihood of the presence of life with metabolic methanogenesis in the interior of Enceladus, is the bio-ecological thermo-kinetic model allowing to discuss the living phenomenon at the same level as various abiotic physico-chemical processes at work in the interior of the small planet. Special thanks to Antonin Affholder

Caroline Avril, Valérie Malavergne, Eric D Van Hullebusch, Fabrice Brunet, Stephan Borensztajn, Jérôme Labanowski, Louis Hennet, François Guyot (2021) Aqueous alteration and bioalteration of a synthetic enstatite chondrite Meteoritics & Planetary Science 56, 3, 601-618

This article is particularly interesting because, among other things, it is one of the few to demonstrate the development of microorganisms on a meteorite substrate. However, sources of carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus had to be added but I hope to demonstrate soon that biological development is possible using those three chemical elements present in natural meteorite substrates

Laura Galezowski, Nadir Recham, Dominique Larcher, Jennyfer Miot, Fériel Skouri-Panet, François Guyot (2020). Microbially Induced Mineralization of Layered Mn Oxides Electroactive in Li Batteries Frontiers in microbiology 11, 2031

I appreciate this work very much because it shows that materials synthesized by microorganisms can be functional and open up relevant applications in the context of the energy transition. Here, the post-synthesis thermal treatment is practically non-existent. The hypothesis that I would like to test now is that there might be an additional interest in using hyperthermophilic microorganisms capable of working at very high temperatures (> 100°C) for this type of synthesis, thus leading to bio-hydrothermal processes.