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Rethinking the boundaries of astrobiology

Image of lady with long blonde hair, with trees and greenery in the background

The Open University hosted Professor Karen Olsson-Francis’ inaugural lecture on 12 July 2022.

In her lecture, Professor Karen Olsson-Francis discussed her work relating to the survivability of microorganisms and how her interdisciplinary approach has led her to rethink the boundaries of astrobiology.

Are we alone in the Universe?’ is one of the most fundamental questions of our time and is the driving force behind the field of astrobiology. To address this question, we must first understand how microorganisms survive, and thrive, in extreme environments on Earth. These environments include those that are analogous with assumed habitable extra-terrestrial locations and so can inform our understanding of habitability and the signs of life (bio-signatures) when exploring beyond Earth.

In this lecture, Karen discussed her work relating to the survivability of microorganisms, including those found at some of the most extreme environments on Earth and those that have been used in exposure experiments onboard the International Space station in low Earth orbit. She demonstrated how the novel approach of combining analogue work with modelling and simulated laboratory experiments, which has been developed at The Open University, has fed into our understanding of habitability beyond the Earth.

Karen described how this approach has resulted in a step-change in astrobiological research, including the formation of AstrobiologyOU, of which she is Director. This unique group brings together scientists, social scientists, governance experts and educators to address the challenges associated with astrobiology and to rethink the discipline’s boundaries.

Watch the recording of Professor Karen Olsson=Francis's inaugural lecture:

Kevin: Good evening everybody. Thank you so much for joining us for today’s Inaugural Lecture. I’m Kevin Shakesheff, I’m the Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research, Enterprise and Scholarship here at The Open University and opening up our Inaugural Lectures is one of the real pleasures of the job. I think they're a fantastic celebration of academic careers and the great things that universities do. So I'm delighted to be here this evening. The Inaugural Lectures are actually invited by the Vice-Chancellor and Tim is here this evening. They are an opportunity to celebrate our academic excellence and the great diversity that we see during the year is one of the real celebrations.

So this evening we're hearing from Professor Karen Olsson-Francis. She's going to explore her work on rethinking the boundaries of life and astrobiology. I should say the lecture is also available in Welsh. The reasons will become clear during the lecture.

A few bits of housekeeping. We're going to have a Question and Answer session hosted by Professor Nick Braithwaite who I'll invite to the stage in a second. Then we're going to have a celebration downstairs after the lecture and the questions. If you're on Twitter please do tell people about the lecture. If you can tag it @OpenUniversity it'll let lots of people know what's happening here on campus and online this evening.

So let me now introduce Professor Nick Braithwaite who will be known to many of you as the Executive Dean for the STEM faculty and he's going to take us through the introduction to Karen, over to you Nick.

Nick: Yes hello everybody and that includes people who are watching online in various parts of this planet and possibly for all I know other planets too. It's a great pleasure to be here talking about Karen Olsson-Francis. Karen is Professor of Geomicrobiology. There's a lot of words coming up now so be careful, geomicrobiology, it's all one word. She's operating in the School of Environment, Earth and Ecosystem Sciences and she is Director of Astrobiology. Astro, out there, biology possibly one thinks of it as being closer here but there is a very strong connection which she has been responsible for developing certainly around here at the OU hence she is Director of AstrobiologyOU. There she's got a group of about 60 scientists and social scientists, governance experts, educators. There's an interesting thing there how broad this team is. They are there to create a large interdisciplinary group, the largest one in Europe working on astrobiology. She's homegrown. She's one of us. We claim her, she studied with us as a Postdoc and has been developing her career ever since. But I think it's that ability to connect across the boundaries which distinguishes her from many of us, and I think that's one of the strengths we'll be hearing about, look out for it. She bridges traditional boundaries in her work across multiple schools here in the faculty, and across the faculties. The Arts and Social Science faculty and the Business and Law faculty are involved in Karen's work. She's worked in some of the most extreme environments, and as many of you will know working in a lecture theatre can be considered an extreme environment as well and she's operated experiments on the International Space Station. Karen is the UK’s national representative on the Committee on Space Research, the International Planetary Protection Panel. Actually what she's doing is very germane to that and that's why she gets singled out for these things. She's also a part of the UK Space Exploration Advisory Group. She's Chair of the Geomicrobiology Committee, a founding member of the European Astrobiology Institute, and an elected member of the European Astrobiology Association. That's an impressive list of credentials and I can tell you no more. I need Karen to come here and tell you some more in her lecture. Karen please come and join us.

Karen: Thank you everybody. The last time I actually gave a lecture in public was actually standing here back in January 2020 where we actually launched AstrobiologyOU and a lot has happened since then and I will be touching on some of that work here today. If you want to follow us on Twitter our Twitter handle is down here on the right and actually we'll be live tweeting some of the relevant papers that the group have produced so some of the work that we talk about. So if you see a symbol and you follow us on Twitter there'll be a link to the papers as well.

So are we alone in the universe is probably one of the most captivating questions in our time. It's one of the driving forces behind the field of astrobiology. It covers everything from the origins of life on early Earth, right through to habitability in our solar system and finding evidence of life through life detection missions. As a science it crosses the boundaries between planetary, Earth and biological sciences. But here at The Open University we push those boundaries. We push those boundaries to include science, social sciences and humanities. As Nick mentioned we formed AstrobiologyOU which is a unique group which brings together experts from across multiple faculties within the University. In this lecture I will out roll the small part that I played in building this group, the life choices that have led to the role I'm in today, and the support that I've had over the years which has made all of this possible.

So going back to Kevin's note about why this is going to be translated into Welsh. Well growing up in a small Welsh village in north Wales being educated through the medium of Welsh, astrobiology wasn't a natural career decision for me. I actually spent my summers working in the Wrexham Lager and if any of you have ever tasted the delights of Wrexham Lager it has to be one of the most finest beers in the world. But I went to university convinced I was going to do a degree in Brewing and Distilling. But it was actually while I was at university I developed an interest in microbiology.

So microbiology is the study of microbial life and these microbes are generally naked to the eye. What we know about microbes is that they are ubiquitous on Earth so they are found nearly everywhere. So this is going to scare you guys, this picture here is of a swipe from the surface of a mobile phone, you've all got them in your pockets, I know it, admit it, but there's going to be microbes like this growing on there so just be prepared for that. But seriously though microbes do play such a huge part in everyday life. They shape the environment that we live in and our health. There's approximately 5 million trillion trillion microbial cells on Earth, and they’re one of the major sources of organic carbon. What we know about microbial life is it’s probably one of the most earliest forms of life. Evidence suggests that about 3.7 billion years ago there’s evidence of life existing. So we think that microbial life is one of the most earliest forms. What we do know, like most life, that there's three key requirements. It all needs a liquid water, it needs chemicals, bio essential elements, and it needs an energy source. So us as humans, we get energy from eating food and respiring oxygen, but life has evolved to use a much wider array of chemicals. So for example, there's lots of microorganisms that actually live in anaerobic environments and oxygen actually kills them. Also we have organisms that can use inorganic compounds rather than organic compounds. So for example molecular hydrogen, sulphide, ferrous irons to name but a few. Studying these microbes the complexity and extremity of these microbial lives on earth actually enable us to speculate about the existence of life on other planets, both within our solar system and beyond.

The way that these microorganisms adapt mean that they can live in some of the most extreme environments on Earth. These are not my holiday shots but they are of New Zealand. Louise Thomas actually let me have these. We know from looking at these kind of extreme environments that they’re teeming with microbial life. So we know that life can live in hydro-thermic vents, in mud pools and the environmental conditions of these are really extreme. Microbes that can live in these environments are what we call extremophiles, so extreme loving microorganisms.

There’s a bit of an OU video here, I had to put it in just to keep you all on your toes. So microbes can live in hot pools and desert environments, the bottom of the ocean. So microbes that live in hot environments above 65º are called thermophiles. We have microbes that can live in really cold environments that are called psychrophiles and then we have microbes that can live in multiple extremes, everything from high pH and temperature through to desiccation and UV resistant. Then we have this group of organisms, they're very much the superheroes of the microbial world, which can survive everything such as high temperatures, low pH, high salinity and even nuclear waste. But some of those environments that I showed you towards the end it's more common to have more than one extreme. These are environments, so for example, we look at hydrothermic systems, we don't just have the high temperatures, they're normally either highly acidic or highly alkaline as well, and the life that live within these environments are called polyextremophiles. Do you see a trend coming in here? Polyextremophiles are microbes that can live in multiple extreme environments everything from salinity to high pH, etc.

So when I started to think about doing a PhD I’d just finished travelling around New Zealand and I felt I really loved microbiology and studying extremophiles to me was kind of a natural step. At the time there'd been a lot of work looking at individual extremes on microbes, very much from a biotechnological perspective but there wasn't much work that had been done looking at the mechanisms and evolution of adaptation to multiple extremes. So when I was thinking about PhD, this is when this kind of work was starting. I was lucky to get an international fellowship to go to the University of Otago in New Zealand where I was able to study this, and going back to those initial photos, New Zealand is a prime location to look at these extreme environments. But also, obviously, you can't go to New Zealand without appreciating the culture, the environment, and obviously the All Blacks, I had to put that one in there.

So the work that I was particularly looking at was a microbe. That sounds like just one microbe, I spent three years studying a microbe, that's correct. But this microbe was special. It was isolated from a geyser on Mount Te Aroha which is the only Maori word I know but translates as the Mountain of Love. If anyone's ever interested I can do Maori translation for you. But what was interesting about this geyser is that the pH was about 9.5 and the temperature was above 65º. So this microorganism which was called TA201 which hasn't actually been classified, was able to survive in these extreme environments. What we know from studying extremophiles under single conditions that high temperature causes problems with membrane fluidity and this causes problems with biochemistry. We know that in highly alkaline environments the microbes have to maintain the pH within their cytoplasm to keep it near neutral otherwise it impacts on biochemical processes. So the work that I was doing was looking at how a microbe was able to survive both of these conditions. So I did a lot of work looking at the bioenergetics. So looking at how it could produce ATP under these multiple conditions. So what we were able to look at was looking at the physiology of it, looking at the sodium antiporters that could survive and the mechanisms that it could ploy. But when I started my PhD though, probably two years into my PhD, Lynn and Rocco, Lynn Rothschild and Rocco Mancinelli wrote this review paper, and it's probably one of the most pivotal papers of my career. It was a review in Nature and it talked about space as a new category for studying extreme environments. When I meet Lynn and Rocco at conferences I always bring up this paper because this was one of the pivotal moments for me. In that paper Lynn and Rocco talk about space as another frontier for studying extremophiles and they look at it and they talk about it in two ways. They talk about it in the concept of lithopanspermia, which is the transfer of life from one planet to another. So, for example, life on Earth can be transferred to life on Mars. They also talk about it as a way of habitability which is something which has become very key to the work we've been doing over the years. They think about habitability in the solar system. There's kind of two areas that we're focusing on at the moment, and predominantly that's the icy moons and Mars. If we go back to this diagram I showed you previously, there's key requirements for life. It needs liquid water, it needs chemical energy, and it needs bio essential elements. So if we look at the icy moon, so for example, Europa Enceladus, evidence suggests that there’s deep oceans there which supplies water, a watery environment and we also think that there's hydrothermic activity within the deep subsurface. These produce chemical gradients which can allow microorganisms to live. Thermochemical modelling of the composition of this ocean suggests that potentially microbial lives could exist within these oceans.

Again when we look at Mars, when we think about Mars we think about early Mars so about 3.6 billion years ago, the conditions on early Mars we think were very similar to that on early Earth. These large fluvial systems existed which evidence suggests in some of the work that's ongoing at the moment, and as time and the atmosphere have evaporated, it leads to the evaporation of the water leading to these evaporative deposits on the surface. So if life did actually exist today on Mars it would be on the subsurface where it is actually protected from the detrimental conditions on the surface. Because the surface is very arid and it's really highly exposed to radiation.

So although I was starting to become interested in astrobiology my career took a bit of a shift. I left academia for two years and went to go and work in a research institute in New Zealand called agresearch and this is a Crown Research Institute that was very much focused on doing science to help society. So at the time New Zealand was very much involved with the Kyoto agreement about methane emissions and it might not surprise you but there's more sheep and more livestock in New Zealand than there are people. There's about 5 million people in New Zealand where there's about 35 million livestock and these livestock are ruminants. This means that when they eat their food they break down the food, they ferment it and they are releasing methane into the environment. So methane from cows and livestock in New Zealand contributes about 43% of their greenhouse emissions which is really high for a developed country. So the work that we were doing that I was focused on was trying to manipulate the ecosystems within the ruminant, changing the composition of it, if by changing foods or using phage’s or viruses to change it so the mythologemes within the ruminants would not produce methane by changing the ecosystem in there. I promise you there is a reason for this slide and I will come back to it. It does fit into the astrobiology story, I promise you. But after that though I decided, you know, I did have a permanent position and gave it up because I wanted to go back into academia. Rob and I decided we were going to move back to the UK for two years. We were just coming for two years. The plan was we'd be back for 2011 for the Rugby World Cup in New Zealand. 14 years later we're still here. It gets worse. The picture here, Copacabana beach, I was sitting on a beach with Rob and I was like ‘Rob, there's this job come up. It's in Milton Keynes. You are going to love Milton Keynes, it's right on the beach’. At the time I hadn't lived in the UK for eight years so my geography was a little bit skewy. I do know that we are at the most landlocked place within the whole of the UK but we're still here, we are still living the dream in Milton Keynes. But what we did find though, that job that was advertised was working with Professor Charles Cockell who was an established astrobiologist, and still is an established astrobiologist and the work that he was looking at that I was involved with was looking at the survivability of microorganisms and simulated on real low Earth orbit conditions. At the time, and it still is, the OU was a fantastic place to do this. I mean it's such an honour to have Judith Pillinger actually in the crowd today. She played such a key part in that at the time and we have some amazing environmental simulation chambers which Manish Patel runs now, which allow us to actually simulate some of these conditions at The Open University which is really unique and a great opportunity for us as researchers.

At the time experiments in low Earth orbit it was becoming a really exciting time. So I joined the OU in 2008 and it was just coming to the end of the BIOPAN experiments. So on the left the big ball there that's a BIOPAN experiment and basically it is launched into low Earth orbit on a photon rocket, opens up exposing experiments, closes and then it's returned to Earth. They are very short timescale experiments. Typically between 10 and 13 days but in 2008, I think that was probably the last one, we got some experiments brought back from that. But this also coincided with the start of experiments on the International Space Station. The advantage of the International Space Station was that these were experiments that could be taken on for yearly timescales, normally between 18 months upwards. What we do with these you can see quite clearly in the image on the right, is that we can put samples in them and then using filters with different intensities we can kind of manipulate the conditions within the chamber. So if we use a cut-off filter of 200 nanometres, we can put a Martian gas composition in there, we can simulate the conditions on the surface of Mars. So these experiments are not just looking at low Earth orbit conditions but they also allow us to look at simulated Mars conditions in low Earth orbit as well.

Over the years there's been a lot of experiments that have been looking at the survival of microbes and biosignatures in space. I think there's something like 1000 species that have been looked at over the years. What we did here at the OU was a very different approach. What we were focused on was actually rather than looking at survival organisms in low Earth orbit, we were using the conditions of low Earth orbit to select from extreme affiliate microorganisms. So again another nice sunny coastal picture here. This time we have Beer in Devon. What we did was we collected samples from the limestone cliffs as you can see in the image on the left. These limestone cliffs are exposed to periods of desiccation, radiation and high salinity and as you can see this green layer here, this is cyanobacteria and algae. What we did was we were able to collect samples from here and we could expose them as part of the EXPOSE mission and the BIOPAN mission. So actually at the bottom right corner here you can see some of the dark controls. So under the layer we have the samples that are exposed to space conditions, we also have dark controls as well.

In the work that we did we were table to isolate an organism called Gloeocapsa OU_20 and we were able to study that to look at how microbes can survive. What we found was that these organisms were able to produce this really thick extra polysaccharide which could let the radiation not penetrate. Also they produced these kind of big clump materials, as you can see on this image on the right, so they can kind of stump together. So although the radiation and the conditions could penetrate the first couple of layers, they were still able to survive, the cells in the middle.

Now I'm going to do another celebrity shot. Although this work at the beginning was as postdocs, we've continued to work in this area and we've recently just done some work where we’ve just finished analysing some experiments in the BIOPAN experiment. So we've got Nisha Ramkissoon here in the audience, we were looking at the effect of low Earth orbit conditions on key biosignatures. So looking how molecules were actually degraded under Mars conditions and making a database that could be then used by instruments that are on Mars at the moment to see how they compare. But this is probably one of my favourite ESA stories is that a BIOMEX experiment actually came down with Tim Peake and the email we all got from ESA was saying ‘we are a bit worried about the vibration shocks returning to Earth so we've asked the astronauts to use their dirty clothes and stuff it under their seat so it doesn't vibrate’. I asked Tim about this afterwards when I met him, and he said that actually that is a true story. As a microbiologist I'm a little bit concerned about the integrity of those samples, but hey, who am I to complain?

I think then though there was a bit of a shift, a change. I was very lucky. We had Emily and Matthew, and as everybody who was in planetary science in the UK did at this time, my contract was coming to an end and my life was in the gods of the consolidator grant, an STFC consolidator grant, I was waiting to see what would happen there. So we were lucky I think. There was Manish and Vic and Charles wrote a grant and it was successful. I was named Postdoc, but by a twist of fate Charles took the labs and moved to Edinburgh which was a fantastic opportunity for him but it meant for us as a family though we were very settled down here so I stayed, which meant that when I went on maternity leave I had about a year left on my contract. But thankfully to Sue Horne and the UK Space Agency and the Aurora, there was a call of Aurora fellowships out at the time. So I think it got announced just after I went on maternity leave and I packed up my six week old daughter and moved in with my parents for three weeks and wrote a fellowship.

It was successful but we're going back to the cow story. So this is where it all fits together now. So in 2004 Mars Express suggested there was methane on Mars. In 2011 NASA reported high resolution of methane from Earth observations and then in 2012, which happened to coincide with my fellowship application, Curiosity rover repeated methane and measured methane on the surface of Mars. So on Earth methane is either produced abiotically and this can be due to serpentinization of rocks producing hydrogen which reacts with the carbon dioxide to produce methane, or as I showed with the cows, it could be produced by biology. So the work that I was doing was very much looking to see if methanogenic microbes from extreme environments were able to grow under simulated Martian conditions. So we can simulate the conditions of Mars by using regolith, we know what the chemistry is so we can simulate that here on Earth to see if these microbes could actually live in the subsurface and produce methane. But this was linked to the Aurora mission, so very much focused on biosignatures. As well as methane being a potential biosignature I got interested in looking at, due to the colleagues which I’ll mention in a minute, geological biosignatures. So these are actually secondary minerals, alteration minerals, that are formed due to physical chemical alteration to existing primary minerals. These minerals are produced differently depending on if it's an abiotic or biotic system. So they can be used as a signature to detect life. The instruments that we have on Mars at the moment are able to measure some of these key secondary minerals as well.

So at the time I was really lucky to be at The Open University. I felt I had such a great group of peers around me. So Susanne Schwenzer who has COVID tonight, so hi Susanne, she was part of the Curiosity science team. So she was actually involved in the mission that I mentioned back in 2012. She's also a Martian guru mineralogist. Then as well as that we have Manish Patel who is the co-PI of the Nomad instrument, which is on the Trace Gas Orbiter which is orbiting around Mars, one of its goals was to look for methane. Then we have Vic Pearson who is an absolute guru on organic geochemistry and understanding carbon on Mars and is a very good translator between me and Susanne when we couldn't understand each other because interdisciplinary science can be very difficult. We now get each other, it's just taken a bit of time.

But what this did mean though was that we weren't just coming from disciplinary boundaries, different points of view, it meant that we could look at our experiments differently. This is kind of the way that we've started to do our research. So we could take data from Mars direct from the missions, Susanne could thermochemically model it. So using that information to predict what the chemical environment would be. So this would allow us to look at the composition of potential water on Mars to see if it has the chemicals that we need, and the physical environment. Then this is where I come in, we would take microbes from extreme environments and then we could simulate them under lab conditions to look if they could grow under Mars conditions and what biosignatures that they could produce. So in this chamber, we actually officially opened the labs today, we would put in some Martian regolith, again Nisha Ramkissoon was leading on this work looking at if the microbes can grow in these environments and what biosignatures they could use.

As well as the lab work, we were doing a lot of simulation and analogue fieldwork. So this is a game we play when we do outreach. It’s guess which is Mars and which is Earth, but I'm not going to make you guess today. On the right here we have the Atacama and on the left here we have the surface of Mars. If you take the roads and the buildings that have the Atacama in the picture they do look very similar, but they don't just look similar, some of the parameters within them are very similar as well. So we have fluctuations in temperature. They're very desiccated environments. There can be high UV, well not as high obviously on Mars as they are on Earth, but those kind of environments which allow us to look at microbial life in a similar way as we can on Earth. So we use this model to look at habitability beyond the Earth by using analogues on Earth. There's no perfect analogue site, it all depends on what environment you're looking at, and what time period that you're looking at as well.

So here are some of the places that the group's been over the last few years. So we've been everywhere from the saltpans in Botswana, right through where we're using as an analogue for present day service of Mars, right through to Svalbard and Iceland, looking at these cold environments as well. So there's a whole selection of environments that we can use to look at these. There's no one perfect analogue.

I think for me though personally probably the most extreme environment that I've ever been to is the Danakil Depression, the hydrothermic system there. This was back in 2017 when access to the sites was becoming more open. Infrastructure was put in place. It's really extreme. So this water, what you think is water is actually acid, about pH 0, the temperature in the morning when you go sampling is about 36º or 38º but actually can rise up to 50º.

So these are like supersaturated hydrothermic waters and they form this bedrock, and they're very sulfuric acid environments. So the work we were doing was looking at if biosignatures of life could exist within these evaporative deposits. So the environment is actually too extreme for active lives to be definitely grown within these environments, but what we can see are little cells like morphological biosignatures within the evaporitic deposits. I think from a scientific perspective going out into the field was an absolutely amazing opportunity for me but I think what did hit me more though, and I think this was again a very pivotal point to my career, was actually the people, the local and indigenous communities.

So this is the local village that we stayed in. So the beds that we slept in can be seen down here on the right, the picture above is that hut where we kept all our science equipment. We had armed guards because even back in 2017 there was still concern about terrorism attacks and the whole economy before tourism and science came through there was very much driven by the salt industry in the region. This place really touched me. I think I wanted to give back to the community that we were there with. So back in 2018 myself and Barbara Cavalazzi from the University of Bologna went back to the University of Mekelle in Ethiopia and set up a workshop which the aim of it was to teach teachers in that region, in the Afia region of Ethiopia, about their local environment. It was about science, but it was about helping them in business. Eco-tourism was starting to become a big thing at the time so it was giving them that information. It was a very difficult time because just after we came back from there the civil unrest in Ethiopia happened so we can't actually communicate with our colleagues at the University of Mekelle at the moment, we haven't for a few years now. We were planning, The Open University had gifted us a set of microscopes when we were going to go out there and set up this infrastructure out there for local schools and I hope one day that we can go back and do that. We have still kept our links with Ethiopia. Michael Macey and I have a PhD student at the University of Science and Technology in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, and he'll hopefully be coming over in September to use our molecular biology facilities. We're trying to help the university there set up the first molecular biology labs in Northern Africa, but with the situation there at the moment it's quite difficult. So where we can we can support them to come over and work with us. But at the time the science and the analogue work was starting to develop but we also started to realise that the research that we were doing had an application as well, it could be applied. One of the things that we started to look at, Manish you're going to love this picture aren’t you, you’re shaking your head. You gave me the photo, is about financial protection and this is about the practice of protecting solar system bodies from contamination by Earth life and protecting Earth from possible life forms that may have been returned from other solar system bodies. At the time Vic Pearson and I had been doing some work regarding regulations of planet protection in the outer solar system as part of a project that the EU had funded. I was quite lucky because also at the time, again I'm going to do a photo, here's me at the UN in Vienna. I was very lucky that the UK Space Agency were looking for a representative on the COSPAR Planetary Protection Panel and I was lucky enough to be selected and we're very lucky today to have Athena, the Chair of the panel in the audience, so thank you Athena.

So we started thinking about planet protection. So from a regulatory perspective, but also as a science, very much interested in looking at using that whole concept of biosignatures to look at bioburden. So some of the work we've been doing with ESCI and one of our project officers is looking at using quick methods to be able to monitor this in cleanrooms. We've been working a little bit with Airbus in this area, and they have co-funded a PhD student with us, Sylvia, who is now Planet Protection Officer at ESA. We're looking with them at the survivability of organisms from cleanroom environments under simulated Mars conditions, seeing how this can impact our understanding of what actually these bioburdens are.

This also led to other commercial opportunities. We have the pleasure at The Open University of working with Geraint Morgan. This is Susanne Schwenzer not Geraint Morgan, sorry I should have explained that. Geraint Morgan who is our knowledge exchange expert, some of the work that he's done again is going back to that concept of looking at biosignatures for evidence of life or contamination, whichever way you look at it. Susanne at the time was also doing some contract work for Airbus with the ExoMars. But what Taff did was he opened our eyes to opportunities that what you can do with science and the commercial opportunities it can offer. So with his help we put together an STFC IAA Award which has allowed us to look at the commercial opportunities of this work. It was a bit of a change in mindset for us. So we as a group started to think about astrobiology in the context of not just science but international development, education, governance and commercialisation. What we realised was that this had the opportunity to be such a big multidisciplinary research area. So when a call came out to look to build a multidisciplinary research centre, I cold called actually the heads of the Strategic Research Areas within the University. So Simon Lee was Head of Citizenship and Governance at the time, we had Giles Mohan who was International Development Inclusive Innovation, and Andrew Holland is Head of the Space SRA. I remember cold calling and saying I've got this idea is there any chance we can get people together from across the University? I think I've never had impostor syndrome so much in my life was as an early career Lecturer, I think I just made Lecturer, I think Vic was Senior Lecturer at the time. We had this meeting where it was just us and a group of Professors from across the University. I think that was a game changer because having the support and belief of those academics really helped us to formulate this concept of AstrobiologyOU. The African saying says it takes a community to build a child. I think for us AstrobiologyOU was built by the support that we had from the academics around us, because I think that has made such a difference for us. So when Research England put out a call back in 2018 for a research group where they were looking at these five specific things about taking a small research group with a potential to grow that could deliver economic and societal impact, we felt we were in a strong position that we hit a lot of these points. So we put together as a team an Expanding Excellence in England award and we were lucky enough to be awarded £6.7M and this allowed us to build AstrobiologyOU.

So the key take home message from AstrobiologyOU is to address the scientific, governance and ethical challenges associated with astrobiology in a sustainable way.

The way we do that is we work across boundaries, but not just from scientists, we’ve been bringing in our colleagues in the other faculties as well. We're focused around these key areas. So finding evidence of life. That's not just from a science perspective. So looking at habitable environments, it’s also looking at the ethical implications of this of looking for life and finding evidence. We actually have a new fellow starting later this year who is a looking at environmental ethics.

It was very much looking at planetary protection again, building on some of the work that I mentioned about developing protocols for measuring bioburden. We've also recently started some work with the UK Space Agency looking at their regulations regarding planet protection and UK launch, and then the earth as an analogue. So again looking at it from a scientific perspective in these extreme environments, understanding how microbial life lives in them, but also looking at the impact this has on the local human populations. I suppose in the middle of that is the societal impact, so international development, engagement, and seeing how we can apply AstrobiologyOU’s research to meet societal needs. So although we have been hit by COVID over the last three years, I think we've been pretty successful. I think we've managed. I think for me though the main point is we've managed to keep 21 PhD students alive during COVID. I think that has to be a big achievement and the fact that we have had six viva’s and they've all gone well as well. So I think that has to be the major achievement for me.

A wise, I would say ‘old’, Professor told me that you should always finish your Inaugural talking about where you're going to be for your career. I've got at least 20 years left, I'm not going anywhere soon. But as astrobiology I think the next 20 years or so is going to be so exciting. We've got Mars sample return, we've got missions to the icy moons, including Europa and Enceladus. We've got the James Webb telescope, you've all seen the pictures hopefully this morning. One of their goals is to look at atmosphere and exoplanets to search the building blocks of life elsewhere in the universe. We even potentially have humans on the Moon and Mars. Again, this is prime opportunity for astrobiology. Personally I have a lot of ideas that I have that I'd like to do over this time, and only if a small part of them come to fruition, I will be extremely busy and extremely happy. But success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. So for me it's about the future generation. In AstrobiologyOU we spend a lot of time building up the next generation and I will be successful if I can play a small part in these guys and what they can do in the future because I'm really excited to see what the group can do going forward.

I have thank yous. There's so many people I would like to thank, but specifically I would like to thank Julia Barkin and the lab team. I mean you guys have been amazing. We went from zero to quite a few labs now. So thank you for all the support during that. I'd like to thank Susanne Schwenzer and Vic Pearson for sharing a brain cell, for being the best work colleagues and friends someone can have especially over the last 5-10 years. I'd love to thank Louise for keep me on the straight and narrow and not breaking too many OU rules and my family and my husband for not trying to change me and my children for just being amazing so thank you.

Nick: Karen thank you very much for that thrilling account of what got you here. An Inaugural Lecture should be about the beginning, we're inaugurating something but what a basis for that beginning. Thank you very much. Let's go across there and we'll take some questions if we could please. We've been joined online I know by all the places that you've referred to around the world, Botswana, Ethiopia, New Zealand you mentioned. We’ve probably got questions from them online and they will be relayed from the bottom here. We have roving microphones going around. If you wait for a roving microphone we'll be able to get your question in, keep it short please but start by saying who you are. So we will open for questions and while people are thinking, I hope you have been thinking just now, I might go for an online contribution first. Can I do that and while that's happening could we get a microphone down to there please? So Hannah have you got something for us?

Hannah: I do. There's been loads coming in. There have been plenty of questions coming through. So I'm just going to quickly filter through to see which ones we've got, please keep them coming. So the first one is a nice sciency one for Karen. So studying the halophiles how are they significant to astrobiology rather than studying extremophiles?

Karen: I think it depends on what you're trying to study. I think halophiles are particularly relevant when we're looking at the surface of Mars nowadays. So we know that there's evaporitic deposits on the surface of Mars and that microbes potentially could be entombed within those salt crystals and what we know from looking at Earth is that the halophilic organisms can actually live in these entombed salts, they can survive in those entombed salts. This is some work that the group has been doing. So halophiles are very relevant for present day preservation of biosignatures.

Mark: Mark Brandon, STEM faculty. You seem to have banished quite a lot of members of AstrobiologyOU around all of the extreme environments on the Earth? I wondered if you had any extreme environments you haven't visited yet and why would you want to go to them?

Karen: That's a good question. I haven't been to hardly any of them. It's all the team that gets to go. They get the exciting part. I think the Azores would be quite interesting, there's quite a lot of hydrothermic activity going on there. I think Africa has got a lot to offer for analogue work. I think there's so many untapped resources there and we recently actually had a Professor from Botswana over visiting and we were discussing about the possibilities of setting up a North African analogue site because there's so much variety and I think a lot of them are untapped. It's just getting that balance about going there and studying them. So yes I think it's very much watch this space as we open up some of these analogue sites.

Nick: While I wait for the next question can I just say I think one of the things that you've done as well isn't it is that you use the local people as well, indigenous peoples. So that this is from a sustainability point of view, which matters a lot to me, you're not necessarily sending people out. Tell us about one of those.

Karen: So a prime example would be the work we did in Botswana. So Alex is actually in the crowd today. So we went out and visited the University of BUIST, we went in the field with their Master students, we collected cause, we split the cause 50/50. They analysed their half, we analysed ours, and we published papers together. So it's very much about that relationship. Then it worked when we couldn't go out with COVID, they went and collected samples because we have such a nice working relationship with them that they want to work with us. So it is, it's about building that trust and developing that work with them.

Monica: Monica Grady, STEM faculty. Karen, you talked about ethics and you said you've got an Ethics fellow coming later on in the year. What do you think the effect will be on humanity if we find life say on Mars or in the oceans of Enceladus or Europa? What is your perspective because lots of people ask me and I don't know the answer.

Karen: I think that's a really interesting question. I think it also depends where you find it because if you find it in the subsurface oceans of Europa, it's probably going to be different genesis of life. So to me that is a very complicated question. I think it'll have profound effect if we do find life. I think it would have profound effect and I think we would have to be careful with how it’s communicated. The paper that came out from Jim Green in Nature a couple of months ago about how we have to make sure we get the evidence for that. I think that's all important as scientists, we need to take responsibility for that communication and how we interact with the public on that as well. So I think it would be very much it could go one way or the other.

David: David Male from Life Sciences, if you got an organism back from Mars say, what criteria would you use to decide whether it had evolved on Mars or whether it had arrived from Earth?

Karen: It’s a good question. There's a big debate about that. I think if life had evolved on Mars I think the idea would be that if it is very similar to terrestrial life, sequencing, looking where it fits, there ways and means of doing it and see if it’s deeply branched, because it could be from early Mars, the conditions are very similar and if life was transferred it could be very similar in that way. So, I think it would be very much a look and see as we develop the information about the organism.

Hannah: So this has come in from an OU student and hopefully this will be an easier question than perhaps one that was posed earlier. Astrobiology is a multidisciplinary subject, but are some STEM degrees better suited to work in astrobiology? That's from Guy.

Karen: I think it depends on what part of astrobiology you want to do because it's so interdisciplinary it depends what you're interested in. So I was obviously interested in biology and life sciences so that's the degree decision that I took. I look at other members of the group, they took more of a geology background. So I think it's what interests you because I think astrobiology is so diverse. It's multifaceted and I think you need to pick what's interesting for you and then you can apply it to astrobiology.

Nick: Can I pick up on that one as well and just ask, you talked about the way that Vic Pearson acted as a translator between you and Susanne Schwenser. Can you give us an illustration of the sorts of things that you were finding difficult to communicate about?

Karen: Geologists, they talk a different language. I think it’s really interesting and I think we found this, its terminology is very different. I can't think of an example right now but, you know, habitability means Susanne is looking at very methodically about what is in the environment whereas I'm looking at can life live in there, so it’s kind of that way. I had to learn a lot about geology from Susanne and Vic and they’ve hopefully learnt a little bit from me about biology. It's just understanding that actually it's okay to go ‘Do you know what, I don't understand what you're saying, can you please explain.’ I think that's what we've done as a group because it has been a problem because we've had to do it from a science perspective, but then bring in the social scientists and it's a whole different ballgame. Habitability is a different conversation as well. So it's just being open and trying to work that and I think we discussed having a dictionary where we can translate some of these words and I think that's something we should probably readdress.

Rick: Hi, Rick Holliman, STEM faculty. Thank you, Karen. Fabulous talk. I'm going to take you back to the start to that young person in the Welsh village in north Wales, or indeed potentially somebody in an Ethiopian village and ask you, what piece of advice would you give them? If you could give one piece of advice to a young aspiring scientist to become somebody like you?

Karen: I think it was very much about only doing it if you enjoy it, and also respect the people you're working with, communication is key to that and I think it is about enjoyment and really wanting to do it, and just being kind to people as well because you're going to meet a lot of people and collaborate with lots of people. I think it's just about having those traits and just enjoying what you're doing really because science can be tough. There's a lot of lows, there's some highs, but there's a lot of lows, and you need to really love what you're doing to do it.

Athena: Karen congratulations first of all, and I just wanted to say how lucky we are in our COSPAR Panel on Planetary Protection to have Karen not only because she can translate all the difficult words. I'm a planetologist so I don't understand everything but also she knows how to explain the methane thing in a politically correct way. So because you are an expert on methane and you brought all those cows out there I had a question that relates to that because like Monica I've been asked regularly as well as a Titan expert, what do you think about methanogens and whether those things can exist and be these little organisms and if you could say something about that.

Karen: Methanogens aren't the easiest things to grow on Earth. I can see some of the people giggling in the group, but I think the concept of what they need to grow is just hydrogen and co2. You've got Hydrogen and co2 and you've got carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and phosphorus in that environment and the liquid water, potentially you have the ingredients. If it's there potentially they could grow. They're a group of organisms which are very well adapted to some of these extreme environments.

Speaker: I'm from the Astrobiology group. I was wondering in your opinion what does Mars sample return now means for the future of astrobiology?

Karen: I think Mars sample return is such an exciting mission, the fact that we'll be able to bring samples back and analyse them. I think the missions we've got, the rovers on Mars at the moment are great. We could do some analysis there, but actually getting them back onto Earth so we can do some analysis with the high tech equipment that we have here on Earth I think it's just fantastic for astrobiology. Hopefully it will answer some of those questions that we want to know about habitability and life on Mars.

Nick: To what extent are you worried about us taking things to Mars?

Karen: Big question. I think planet protection needs to be respected. I think that there is such stringent methods and protocols in place to make sure that we don't contaminate Mars. I think for the ExoMars rover there was over 30,000 swabs taken to look at the biocontamination. So we as a community we take it very seriously and I think that's something which we need to maintain.

Helen: Helen Fraser, STEM faculty. So I want to follow on from that question actually. You've mentioned that you're doing a lot of work with the UK Space Agency around UK launch. Obviously, we've all seen, and I think I can say it without being libellous. Some commercial entities launch lots of things, and some sovereign nations launch things and accidentally crash them into planets which have led to contamination. So can you comment on how much the sort of sphere of where you're working and the risk of planetary protection is changing as space becomes an incredibly commercial entity and that is what's driving us forward there?

Karen: I think that's more than a UK launch because I think what you're talking about specifically is around probably the Mars environment. I think it's about working together, it's getting buy-in from the community, I think the COSPAR Planet Protection Panel has done a lot of work on this and it's about working as a community to ensure that we keep Mars safe and we don't contaminate it and working together with the agencies and the private identities to make sure that we're in a situation where we have these guidelines and these regulations in place.

Hannah: Do we assume that life on other planets is similar to life on Earth? How can we detect life elsewhere if it works in a completely different way? That's from Stacey Phillips who in fact made our Lego videos, I'm sure she says hi.

Karen: That's another one of those big questions. The way I look at it is, I'm very much focused on it's probably going to be potentially like what we have, or similar. It’s not going to be little green men. It’s going to be very much if we did find live single organisms. So that's why we study microbiology. We know what the key ingredients are for life is on Earth so we would be able to look at this potential life to see if it has some of those key traits. It depends on the location as well. So for example, as I mentioned, the icy moons would be a different genesis, whereas Mars it could potentially be transported from Earth.

Hannah: Thank you very much. I've just got one last thing from online. We received an email in fact from your PhD student in Ethiopia and I just wanted to read it to you if that's okay, it’s just very short. But it says “Dear Professor Karen, I am pleased to say congratulations on your Inaugural Lecture. You are the one going to make the great impact on my career and I look forward to your mentorship as my PhD supervisor too. May the event be successful and best wishes in your continued success.”

Nick: Very good. It's a good point I think to draw the conversation here to a close, we have other things to go on and think about and Kevin over to you.

Kevin: Thanks very much Nick, just on behalf of everybody, thanks to Karen but also to Nick for a great discussion. A great lecture Karen, what really shone through to me there, obviously your own personal commitment and determination, but also the fact that your successes are down to a large community and I think it's great that so many people are here today in Milton Keynes, but I'm also sure online. The local OU family that supported you, the UK community, but also the international community that's come along. I think that's a lot down to you but also I'd like to thank on behalf of Karen everyone who's been part of this fantastic story. So let me bring things to a close today. Just to say that if you have attended today we will ask you for some feedback on the organisation and the session today. So look out for that. We also want to advertise our next Inaugural Lecture which is going to be by John Butcher. John's going to be speaking on the theme of widening participation. So we hope you're able to make that either in person or online. After the lecture we're going to have a few refreshments so if you can join us downstairs if you're able to that would be fantastic. Finally just on behalf of everyone can we again just thank Karen for a fantastic lecture.

About Professor Olsson-Francis

Karen is Professor in Geomicrobiology, in the School of Environment, Earth and Ecosystem Sciences. She is the Director of AstrobiologyOU, a group that brings together over 60 scientists, social scientists, governance experts and educators to create the largest interdisciplinary astrobiology group in Europe. Since 2019, Karen and AstrobiologyOU have secured over £10m of funding, including £6.7m from Research England as part of their Expanding Excellence in England scheme. Her background is in microbiology with a PhD in microbial physiology of extremophilic microorganisms from the University of Otago in New Zealand. She has over 10 years’ experience working as part of international consortia that use the International Space Station to study microbial and biosignature survival in low Earth orbit. Karen also has a track record in planetary protection and is the UK national representative on the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) International Planetary Protection panel. She is also a founding member of the European Astrobiology Institute, and an elected member of the European Astrobiology Network Association.

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