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Carnegie Mellon Press Release
Contact: Eric Sloss
412-268-5765

For immediate release:
February 10, 2003

Carnegie Mellon Scientist Receives NASA Award
  to Develop Probes to Detect Life on Mars
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PITTSBURGH - Carnegie Mellon University scientist Professor Alan 
Waggoner has received a three-year $900,000 award from NASA to develop
fluorescent-dye-based systems to be used in remote operations to 
detect life on Mars and in other hostile or distant environments.

As part of the grant, Waggoner's team will develop new fluorescent 
dyes that bind to the common building blocks of life - DNA, lipids, 
carbohydrates and proteins. The grant also provides funds to develop 
an optical system that can spray these fluorescent dyes on a region of 
soil to detect life forms in the environment. This system is expected 
to be completed within several years. The Waggoner team is 
collaborating with researchers at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics 
Institute; the final life detection system should be versatile enough 
to couple with different types of rovers used in planetary 
expeditions.

The scope of the grant includes developing dyes and testing their
feasibility in local environments, as well as areas hostile to life, 
such as the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, where relatively few 
pockets of life persist. Given its Mars-like terrain, the Atacama is a 
favorite laboratory testing ground for astrobiologists.

"It's tremendously exciting to extend the work of our team and 
contribute to interplanetary searches for life," says Waggoner, who 
directs the Molecular Biosensor and Imaging Center (MBIC) at the 
Mellon College of Science. "We believe that these methods will provide 
the most sensitive means of detecting life with a remote device."

The technology has potential beyond Mars, according to Shmuel 
Weinstein, project manager. "The scientific impact of our work begins 
on earth, with the ability to detect very low concentrations of living 
and dead organisms."  Once developed, this system could work in 
circumstances such as biohazardous settings or extreme environments, 
where an automated, unmanned device would be ideal.

Developing fluorescent markers to detect life in space for this 
project presents many technical challenges, according to Gregory 
Fisher, project imaging scientist. Fluorescent markers that bind to 
their targets must stand out against what could be a blinding 
background of natural mineral luminescence.

Additionally, detecting low levels of light emitted from relatively 
few organisms could be difficult against reflected light that is 
originally emitted from the optical instrument. Just as big a 
challenge is creating a detection system that resembles a good 
epi-fluorescence microscope used on earth, but one with few, if any, 
moveable parts. The completed system will need to focus using a camera 
range finder (like those found in hand-held cameras), in addition to 
providing some additional processing of its own camera images.

"Other testing methods require considerably more sampling or are less
sensitive than what we propose. We don't know of other remote methods
capable both of detecting low levels of micro-organisms and 
visualizing high levels incorporated as biofilms or colonies," adds 
Fisher.

Additionally, notes Lauren Ernst, project chemist, Martian life forms 
may contain different structural components than those found on earth. 
"We want our reagents to visualize any form of life that might be 
present. We will define fluorescent probes to detect the smallest 
amounts of DNA, lipids, carbohydrates and proteins."

For example, Ernst will design fluorescent tags to the materials 
containing peptide bonds, a signature feature of proteins. Other tags 
will target a variety of sugars that comprise carbohydrates. Moreover, 
these tags will not be specific for left- or right-handed structures. 
Such "handedness," or chirality, characterizes proteins and other 
compounds on earth, but Martian life could exhibit opposite chirality 
from our own.

Other members of Waggoner's team who will be performing critical 
research as part of this grant include Christoffer Lagerholm and Byron 
Ballou.

The fluorescent marker technology proposed is based on the extensive
expertise of the MBIC at Carnegie Mellon. Established 17 years ago 
with a multimillion-dollar grant from the National Science Foundation, 
MBIC combines research on molecular and cellular sensors along with 
research in imaging and computation to understand biological function. 
The Waggoner team is world renowned for developing widely 
commercialized cyanine dye fluorescent labeling reagents that have 
played a significant role in the human genome project and are the main 
dyes used to analyze gene activity in the regulation of cells and 
tissues.

For more information about the grant or MBIC, please contact Lauren 
Ward at 412-268-7761 or wardle{at}andrew.cmu.edu. For information about 
interplanetary research under way at the Robotics Institute, please 
contact Anne Watzman at 412-268-3830 or aw16{at}andrew.cmu.edu.

NOTE TO EDITORS: Dr. Lauren Ernst will be attending the NASA 
Astrobiology Institute Meeting, held Feb. 10-12, at Arizona State 
University, in Tempe, Ariz. He can be reached directly at the meeting 
by calling Sheraton Phoenix Airport Hotel (480-967-6600) or his cell 
phone (412-389-3083).

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