Desert bacteria may be the key to life on Mars

The Atacama Desert is reminiscent of the brutal conditions on Mars. Scientists have discovered how extreme bacteria adjusted to the environment.

Nowhere on Earth is the landscape more like that of Mars than in the Atacama Desert of Chile, that is the world’s driest place and has a high content of salts in the ground, making up almost impossible conditions of life.

Although scientists have found bacteria in the desert several times, the discoveries have always been explained by the fact that they had probably been carried by the wind and are hence not full-time desert residents.

However, new DNA analyses reveal that the bacteria do live in the desert, only they hibernate, when there is neither enough water nor nutrition, converting themselves into spores that protect the DNA in the hostile landscape for millions of years.