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This week, the NASA Goddard Instrument Field Team (GIFT) is on the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii, researching underground caves formed by molten lava, called lava tubes, so we can better understand them on other planets.

Seismic waves travel through air much more slowly than they travel through rock, so theoretically, if there’s a big space filled with air underground we should be able to tell based on the time and energy of the waves we detect.

Day 3 - heading into the lava tube with the Geochemistry team. The team is collecting samples and taking measurements with a few different instruments - all with the goal of figuring out what the rocks in the lava tube are made of. Do they contain life? What kind?

Okay tube break to post and take a moment to share how cool this lava tube is. CAVE SCIENCE!!!

What gear do you need to stay safe in a lava tube? We made this handy guide

Okay out of the tube again. See all that white stuff from the lava tube? It’s full of life. We are here to find out what microbes are there and how they get their energy. From chemicals? Water? Sunlight? For example some bacteria use sulfur to live & reproduce.

We are testing methods to detect those microbes and also defining where in the lava tube is a good place to find them. That way, when we go to Mars we can know how and where to look for microbial life.

I’m excited to share our new paper on the fundamental biology of RETRONS. Retrons are incredible molecular machines that produce small fragments of reverse transcribed DNA in bacteria that functions in phage defense. academic.oup.com/nar/advance-ar… Nucleic Acids Res Gladstone Institutes UCSF Bioengineering & Therapeutic Sciences

*Preprint Alert* This one’s in a new area for the lab: phage editing! We're using retrons to produce recombineering donors ~inside~ bacterial hosts. A wild-type phage infects the host and an edited phage comes out. biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

While in a Hawaiian lava tube, astrobiologists discovered new species of microorganisms thriving in the extreme environment! Data gathered will inform future missions to Martian lava tubes, locations some suspect life could’ve migrated to after Mars’ surface became inhospitable.

Learn more about NASA Expeditions and how studying life on Earth helps NASA search for life on Mars: go.nasa.gov/4397plv

“The microbes we found in Hawaii could be similar to microbes that once lived on Mars, or even microbes that live there today,” says chloe. Fishman is now an RA at Gladstone. Read more about her work prior to joining our team. ⬇️ go.nasa.gov/3my45Qe

New preprint! Simultaneous multi-site editing of individual genomes using retron arrays. We're trying to make it easier to make multiple, non-adjacent, precise mutations to a genome without long cycles of editing, isolating , and editing again. biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Multiple packaging simulations produced globally different conformations of the packaged genome, suggesting that the packaging process itself gives mature virions individual traits encoded by the topology of its genome.

Immense gratitude to Luciano (@MarraffiniLab) for his support, Dalton Banh for his invaluable guidance, and chloe for daily laughter and inspiration. Studying bacTIRial ;) immunity with you all has been one of the greatest joys of my life. biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Continuous multiplexed phage genome editing using recombitrons go.nature.com/3yUNYTi

Multiplexed editing of phage genomes using retrons, now published at Nature Biotechnology with lots of new bells and whistles. chloe kate crawford Santi Bhattarai-Kline Darshini Poola Karen Zhang Alex González-Delgado Matías Rojas Montero nature.com/articles/s4158…

A new retron-based method from the innovative Seth Shipman lab now allows making multiple mutations in a phage genome in a single, easy process - from point mutations to small insertions and deletions Read the overview by Ilya Osterman nature.com/articles/s4158…

First, phages helped us to modify bacterial genomes (lambda-red), now bacterial defense related elements- retrons- help to modify phage genomes - so cool. Will be very interesting to use this method- ordering oligs for cloning:)

🚨 Episode 6 of #FromBenchtoPodcast is live! 🎙️👩🏻‍🔬 Tune in as chloe and I dive into the fascinating world of #PhageTherapy, the importance of #Mentorship, and a touch of #Astrobiology! 🦠👩🏻‍🚀 Don’t miss this exciting conversation Nature Biotechnology open.spotify.com/episode/64hd7U…