Isolation and Characterization of Puerto Rican Soils Bioprospects Resistant to Metals Marzo 2, 2009

Abstract

Astrobiology is a novel interdisciplinary science that studies the origin, evolution and distribution of life on Earth and in the Universe. One of the NASA’s program priorities involves the analysis of microbes as a source to understand the response of organisms to conditions in space or other planets.  Possible bioprospects are microorganisms that live or survive extreme environments, such as high concentrations of metals. These bioprospects could represent an important source of information for NASA about life in environments with similar extreme conditions.  The main focus of this research is to isolate and characterize microorganisms that can tolerate high concentrations of metals to further understand their resistant mechanism.  Environmental samples were processed by serial dilutions and spreaded on a media supplemented with different concentrations of copper. Then, the metal resistant microbes (MR-Microbes) were initially characterized microbiologically.  A total of eight bioprospects were obtained from different environmental samples.  The macroscopic characterization shows that most of the colonies have a regular shape, but only two shows an irregular shape.  Also the colonies showed pigmentation which range from white to blue/green.  The isolates showed two types of texture cottony and powdery.  Microscopically, some of the bioprospects presented asexual reproduction structures such as vesicle, phialides and conidias that are associated with the genus Aspergillus sp.  Ongoing research is being performed to start analyzing the molecular physiology of the sample.