Is there life on Mars?

That is exactly what Dr. David Thomas, Lyon College associate professor of biology, and a team of researchers would like to know.

Thomas, along with Lyon students Melissa Kuehl, Michael McQueen and geneticist Dr. Han Ong, are involved in researching caves to determine if life could exist on Mars.

The research is funded by NASA and the Arkansas Space Grant Consortium. Thomas was awarded two grants at the end of last year worth a total of $6,000 for the cave bacteria research. He recently received three additional grants to study microbial diversity in Blanchard Springs Caverns. The three grants total $15, 294.

In the research, Thomas goes to area caves that aren’t protected and collects microbes, which are very small life forms present in things such as bacteria, fungi or algae. Cave microbes are researched because it is believed they make their food out of minerals using chemicals in rocks instead of using light like most life.

Thomas said the research consists of looking at extreme limits of life and applying that to early environments on Earth and off.

Images from the planet Mars, which has a hostile surface environment, show it has caves called lavatubes. Lavatubes are caves made from lava that flows from volcanoes.

“If we can figure out how cave microbes make a living (on Earth), then we can kind of know how they would live on Mars,” Thomas said.

Thomas said the research goes even deeper than life on Mars.

“We don’t know how easy life forms,” he said. “Right now we have ‘one’ which is that all life on Earth is the same.”

Thomas said that if life is found on Mars, even in microbes, and it is completely different than the life on Earth, then that tells a great deal about the diversity of life. But, if it looks exactly like it does on Earth, which shows that life gets transported somehow.

“When things such as meteors hit the Earth, the impact causes stuff to fly into space,” he said. This “stuff” includes living bacteria from the earth. If the bacteria survive in space then it is possible that some of the bacteria from Earth could land on other planets, such as Mars. That brings the question, if it is possible for microbes from earth to fly into space and land on other planets, could the process be reversed? Could microbes from other planets land on Earth?

“There’s no evidence that that has ever occurred, but there is evidence that proves it can happen,” Thomas said.

Thomas and his team take samples from around crystallized formations in caves because most cave formations are started by microbes. They then use classical biology to research it.

“It has its pros and cons,” he said. “It doesn’t tell you why (the microbes) are there but you find a lot more things in a sample.”

Thomas also has the help of geneticist Dr. Ong who uses DNA probes to identify the microbe by its genes.