Radiation Resistance of Sequencing Chips for in situ Life Detection
Name
Carr-2013-Radiation Resistance of Sequencing Chips for i.pdf
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904.38 KB
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Author(s)
Carr, Christopher E.
Rowedder, Holli
Lui, Clarissa S.
Zlatkovsky, Ilya
Papalias, Chris W.
Bolander, Jarie
Myers, Jason W.
Bustillo, James
Rothberg, Jonathan M.
Ruvkun, Gary
Date Issued
June 2013
Journal
Astrobiology
Publisher
Mary Ann Liebert
Citation
Carr, Christopher E. et al. “Radiation Resistance of Sequencing Chips for in Situ Life Detection.” Astrobiology 13.6 (2013): 560–569. © 2013 Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Life beyond Earth may be based on RNA or DNA if such life is related to life on Earth through shared ancestry due to meteoritic exchange, such as may be the case for Mars, or if delivery of similar building blocks to habitable environments has biased the evolution of life toward utilizing nucleic acids. In this case, in situ sequencing is a powerful approach to identify and characterize such life without the limitations or expense of returning samples to Earth, and can monitor forward contamination. A new semiconductor sequencing technology based on sensing hydrogen ions released during nucleotide incorporation can enable massively parallel sequencing in a small, robust, optics-free CMOS chip format. We demonstrate that these sequencing chips survive several analogues of space radiation at doses consistent with a 2-year Mars mission, including protons with solar particle event–distributed energy levels and 1 GeV oxygen and iron ions. We find no measurable impact of irradiation at 1 and 5 Gy doses on sequencing quality nor on low-level hardware characteristics. Further testing is required to study the impacts of soft errors as well as to characterize performance under neutron and gamma irradiation and at higher doses, which would be expected during operation in environments with significant trapped energetic particles such as during a mission to Europa. Our results support future efforts to use in situ sequencing to test theories of panspermia and/or whether life has a common chemical basis.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
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Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1089/ast.2012.0923
