As always, the title is grossly incorrect.
The "microbe", is a blue-green alga, Chroococcidiopsis.
It does not produce oxygen from Martian soil, but from water, if you give water and solar light to it.
The newsworthy part is that this cyanobacterium can survive in the presence of the toxic Martian soil and it can also survive the freezing caused by the Martian temperatures.
Therefore it could be used in some kind of greenhouses built on Mars, but a water source for supplying the greenhouse must be found.
In general, on Mars producing enough water to cover all needs will be the greatest technical challenge. All other substances are abundant enough in comparison with the required quantities, except possibly the noble gases, like argon and helium (but in the non-oxidizing Martian atmosphere there will be much less need of inert gases for techniques like welding).
This is so inspiring. It has become almost axiomatic that Martian regolith is toxic. [1] This microbe research represents a move in thinking from planetary protection (protecting us from Mars) to In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU), using Mars to support us. The microbe turns two liabilities — the high perchlorate ClO4 mineral content and the atmospheric CO2 — into the two necessities for a colony: building material and breathable air.
[1] References:
Davila, A. F., Willson, D., Coates, J. D., & McKay, C. P. (2013). Perchlorate on Mars: a chemical hazard and a resource for humans. International Journal of Astrobiology, 12(4), 321–325. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1473550413000189
Oze, C., Beisel, J., Dabsys, E., Dall, J., North, G., Scott, A., Lopez, A. M., Holmes, R., & Fendorf, S. (2021). Perchlorate and Agriculture on Mars. Soil Systems, 5(3), 37. https://doi.org/10.3390/soilsystems5030037
Perchlorate on Mars – Overview and Implications. (2019). (NASA Technical Report).
Perchlorate-Reducing Biofilms Open a New Avenue for Martian Agriculture. (n.d.). Current Trends in Biotechnology and Bioengineering Sciences, 1(1).
Potential Health Impacts, Treatments, and Countermeasures of Martian Dust on Future Human Space Exploration. (n.d.). Life.
That reminds of how oxygen itself was highly toxic to the early anaerobic lifeforms on Earth.
[flagged]
I thought Martian soil was full of perchlorate, which produces oxygen if you just get it wet and expose it to somewhere the gas can escape?
I guess we'll never know, because this article is just blogspam linking another blogspam article that doesn't link the actual preprint, just says, "A recent paper from Daniella Billi of the University of Rome Tor Vergata , [sic] published in pre-print form in Acta Astronautica, reviews how one particular extremophile fills the role of both useful test subject and useful tool all at once."
We've had artifical oxygen generation for a while: [0] . It's probably useful to have a biological method.
The survivability in the soil bit is actually the more important piece.
[0] https://www.nasa.gov/missions/mars-2020-perseverance/perseve...
Such a bad headline, and while some martian soils might not be instantly fatal to everything once pressurised, and hydrated, the actual ambient conditions on mars, will in fact kill any and all earth life. Building a greenhouse that will feed a human colony on mars is a 2 trillion dollar spend, with a hundred billion.a year to keep the bus running, which I think is something humanity neds to.do, but the only way we can afford it, is to re allot the budgets spent now on aircraft cairier groups.
“Researchers tested this by using soil that mimics Martian regolith. “
Would this hold for real Martian regolith?
Once the Mars Sample Return brings some back we can test that...
Lame title. Life wasn’t found on mars they just cultured a microbe on soil from mars.
IMHO I feel the title is appropriate. They are not claiming to have found life on Mars, they are making the very pivotal claim that there are forms of life that can turn liabilities on Mars into assets.
Agreed, the clear was very clear for me too. I wonder what the microbe eats, and if we can supply that in enough volumes to make a dent to Mars' atmosphere.
True, it is deliberately misleading. However, some possible indicators of life have been found on Mars although these are contested. Two thar I can think of are methane emissions on the planets, and the soil tests by the Viking landers in the seventies, which returned ambiguous results.
> True, it is deliberately misleading.
It's not misleading, this article has nothing to do with finding life on Mars.
> If humans ever build bases on Mars, they will need systems that can provide oxygen without constant resupply from Earth
Have you READ the article ? Or just misinterpreted the title and then commented ?
Punctuation is everything.
I read it first. That second comment about bases is not mine.
The title nor the article ever said that life was found on Mars ?
scientist discover microbe [...] from martian soil
[...] microbe produces oxygen from martian soil
I guess you read it the former way while most people read it the latter way. Neither is wrong or right. Slightly garden-pathy title.
No one writes about technology to colonize Antarctica. Its warmer, has more ready water, less radiation and a breathable atmosphere. Plus its much easier to transport supplies.
Going to Mars gives us biodome diversity. What's the gain in making Antarctica habitable? It's not like we're running out of land, and there are many underutilized parcels of land elsewhere on the planet that would be easier to terraform than Antarctica.
We're terraforming Antarctica to make it (potentially) habitable anyway.
Whether we like it or not.
I think they need to terraform the world's megacities first. :)
Yes and 19th century gentleman scientists were a lot more interested in studying savage tribes than their valets. Imagination is a great motivator and it is more stimulated by what is far away than what is near.
> Story source: Universe Today
Just link that article. I hate this story recycling thing some sites do.
How is it "grossly incorrect"? Using both taxonomic and size classification, is it not accurate to refer to a blue-green alga as a "microbe" or "microorganism." [1]
A microbe (or microorganism) is generally defined as an organism that is microscopic—too small to be seen clearly by the naked eye. Blue-green algae fit this definition as they are single-celled or form microscopic colonies.
The scientific name for blue-green algae is cyanobacteria, which are technically a type of bacteria, universally classified as microbes. [2] They are prokaryotes (lacking a nucleus and other membrane-bound organelles), and the two prokaryotic domains of life (Bacteria and Archaea) are composed entirely of microbes.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9025173/
[2] https://doh.wa.gov/community-and-environment/contaminants/bl...
It is grossly incorrect because it does not "produce oxygen from Martian soil".
This is extremely misleading, because on Mars Martian soil is abundant, while water is very scarce, so the title makes the reader believe that this cyanobacterium solves easily the production of oxygen.
It does not help at all for oxygen production. If you have water, then it is easy to produce hydrogen by electrolysis, using solar energy. Getting water on Mars is the hard problem.
There are chances that such cyanobacteria will be used on Mars, but for producing protein and other useful organic substances, with oxygen only as a byproduct.
However I believe that at least for the more distant future there is a better alternative to the use of cyanobacteria: the capture of solar energy by artificial means, coupled with the synthesis of some simple organic substance, e.g. glycerol or glycine, which can then be used to feed a culture of fungi located underground, which can then produce proteins and all the other complex substances needed for human food. There already are genetically modified fungi that can produce whey protein or chicken egg white protein suitable for human consumption.
This variant is better because photovoltaic cells have better efficiency for capturing solar energy and without environmental constraints, while genetically modified fungi can produce proteins of better quality than cyanobacteria and also any other complex organic substances that will be needed.
I think the problem with your post is that it started a list of "incorrect statements" with a statement that wasn't incorrect.
Maybe I have not been clear enough, but there was no list of incorrect statements, as I was criticizing only a title.
I did not say that was anything incorrect in calling a blue-green alga as "microbe". I have only mentioned what kind of "microbe" they had in mind in order to explain why the title is incorrect in claiming that the "microbe" makes oxygen from Martian soil, because blue-green algae, like plants and like any other living beings from Earth that can produce oxygen, produce the oxygen by splitting it from water and by using energy captured from solar light.
There are no known living beings that can produce oxygen from anything else than water, so if such a "microbe" had been discovered, that would have been a much more important discovery than the possible use of cyanobacteria on Mars.
Unlike the capabilities of catalyzing other chemical reactions, which frequently have appeared multiple times in the history of life, the ability to produce free oxygen has appeared only once and then it has been inherited from that source by all living beings that can do this, even if this heritage has been often transferred between very unrelated living beings. Therefore there exists a unique mechanism for this reaction, based on the oxidation of manganese with the help of solar light, which then oxidizes the oxygen from water into free dioxygen.
The Martian soil is full of oxygen, but most of that oxygen is tightly bound on metallic cations, so it would require a very high amount of energy to be dissociated from them.
Nevertheless, it should be possible to develop an electrolytic process for producing oxygen from the perchlorates that are abundant in Martian soil, saving the precious water for other purposes, i.e. for those that need the hydrogen from water, e.g. for making fuel and food.
> How is it "grossly incorrect"?
Perhaps it's not glossly incorrect, but I classyfy it as "super ultra mega misleading".
I'd like a title like "*Cyanobacteria survives in water contamined with martian soil"
HN title at the moment is: Researchers Find Microbe Capable of Producing Oxygen from Martian Soil
Article title at the moment is: Microbe That Could Turn Martian Dust into Oxygen
Neither of those are particularly misleading, but requires you to read it carefully I suppose, otherwise it can misleading I suppose. I guess "Martian Dust" is the most misleading part of the quote, as the soil isn't actually Martian of origin, but actually "materials that are similar to Martian soil".
> As I have said, the oxygen comes only from water, which is missing on Mars
The title nor the article itself doesn't claim otherwise, unless I'm missing something?
It's also not claiming that the microbe somehow solve the problem of obtaining water, or anything else.
The only thing they claim is that this specific microbe, under the right circumstances, can produce oxygen while it grows in Martian-like soil. That's what the article claims, and the titles.
I am quite ignorant on these specifics but wouldn't it be feasable to basically have them in a greenhouse environment, heated, in the North pole area, where I believe there was some form of IceWater found..
If possible to even melt some of that, and let that cascade the effect ?
https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Mars_E...
That would work only for a base located at the North pole.
If you want to explore other regions, or to set there a base, for instance for extracting some useful minerals, all the water will have to be transported from the poles, unless some quantities of ice will be discovered underground elsewhere (or of hydrated rocks, which can produce water when heated enough).
Unless enough ice or hydrated rocks are discovered underground elsewhere, the amount of ice from the poles will sustain only a small human population.
Yeah, I was expecting something about a microorganism that could (say) decompose perchlorate to release oxygen, not some more mundane photosynthesizer.
From a more complete article... https://www.universetoday.com/articles/one-extremophile-eats...
> But that’s not all Chroo can do - it can live on Lunar and Martian soil, and produce oxygen using only them and photosynthesis. It can even survive the high level of perchlorates found in the Martian soil, a tricky proposition for many Earth-based life forms, but “up-regulating” its DNA repair genes that counter the damage the perchlorates do.
From Acta Astronautica Volume 238, January 2026 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actaastro.2025.09.022
> Indeed, cyanobacterial productivity can be augmented by increasing regolith concentrations, however, the growth with Martian regolith might be harmed by the presence of perchlorates [54] that being chaotropic agents, destabilize macromolecules and trigger oxidative stress [55]. A first investigation showed that Chroococcidiopsis sp. CCMEE 029 copes with perchlorates by over-expressing genes involved in the antioxidant defense and DNA damage repair [56]. On-going proteomics and genomics investigation in the context of the Space It Up project, will better elucidate how this cyanobacterium overcomes perchlorate-induced stress and contribute to fill the gaps to develop cyanobacterial-based life support systems.
For more on CCMEE 029 Algal Research from October 2025 : Uncovering the enhanced antioxidant defense of the desert cyanobacterium Chroococcidiopsis sp. CCMEE 029: A step forward to its use in space life support https://doi.org/10.1016/j.algal.2025.104287