Two Montana State graduate students receive NASA funding for space research

BOZEMAN - With its proximity to Yellowstone National Park, Montana State University has long been a cornerstone institution for research into geothermal environments and geysers. But with new funding, two MSU graduate students will be extending their work from the nearby national park to faraway environments in space, including geyser-like plumes on a moon near Saturn.

Erica Antill and Alexis McDonnell are both doctoral students in the lab of Eric Boyd, a professor in the College of Agriculture's Department of Microbiology and Cell Biology. Antill and McDonnell are recent recipients of FINESST grants, one of NASA's most prestigious funding programs.

FINESST, which stands for Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology, supports research on a variety of topics, including the viability of life elsewhere in the solar system. Each three-year award provides $150,000 to support research, tuition and professional development for early-career scientists.

Antill, who was a 2023 recipient, and McDonnell, who is a 2024 recipient, will use their FINESST funding to explore how microorganisms survive and thrive in frigid, harsh environments.

Both Antill and McDonnell are beginning the second year of their respective doctoral studies. Each of their projects focuses on a different planetary moon - Antill on Enceladus, a moon that orbits Saturn, and McDonnell on Europa, one of Jupiter's largest moons.

Antill's project focuses on the ability of organisms to survive in the water that erupts from Enceladus' surface. When expelled, water that was previously protected under the moon's ice is exposed to an oxygen-free, low-gravity, ultracold and high-radiation environment, meaning that any organisms that could survive there would need to be extremely hardy to be detectable by orbiting spacecraft.

Antill, who is originally from Massachusetts and who completed her master's degree at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, worked for more than a decade as an environmental scientist before shifting her career focus to pursue her doctorate in Boyd's lab.

"There's so much that we don't know yet. I'd had these questions in the back of my head for so many years," said Antill. "So, I decided to make a career change and come to MSU to study extreme microbes."

The spacecraft Cassini orbited Enceladus in 2006 and 2008 and passed through one of the moon's plumes, collecting information about the ice released. The samples contained organic molecules, hydrogen, methane and carbon dioxide - some of the ingredients that could indicate the presence of life, Antill said.

Back on Earth, she examines environmentally similar areas of our planet to see what kinds of organisms live there. Those organisms, some of which produce methane from hydrogen and carbon dioxide, are called methanogens and are some of the oldest known life-forms. The environments she's researching include Robertson Glacier near Canada's Banff National Park and the geysers of Yellowstone.

"Those are the organisms that we think might be most like what you'd find on Enceladus based on the types of rocks and elements that are there," she said. "These metabolisms evolved billions of years ago. Understanding more about the metabolism of organisms that are at the base of the tree of life helps us to understand life's origins more broadly, both here and on other extraterrestrial bodies."

Antill analyzes the samples from environments analogous to those on Enceledus to see what materials are present, and she studies the metabolism of the methanogens living there, knowledge that could help future space missions know what to look for when scanning for life. Importantly, when Antill finds methanogens in her samples, she can test how they'd react when blasted from beneath the moon's surface.

"We're looking at how they react in a vacuum, and to radiation, and to the extreme cold that's in space," Antill said. "Then once we do those exposures, we can see if they can survive those conditions and if they are still detectable."

As a non-traditional student who returned to graduate school later in her life, Antill said her previous work as an environmental scientist blends with her new focus on microbial ecology, a field in which Boyd is a leading scientist. Her FINESST funding has let her attend scientific conferences and interact with researchers who are conducting similar work.

Alexis McDonnell is one of those collaborating scientists. While her work also centers on a frigid extraterrestrial moon, her FINESST project instead focuses on how microbes on Earth use chemical energy from rocks to survive in extremely cold, dark environments with the goal of providing a framework for the search for life on Europa.

Her work is aptly timed, as NASA will launch a mission to Europa later this year. Like Antill, she has collected samples from subglacial systems to inform her work on how life may be supported on Europa. In March, she traveled to Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago, to sample subglacial meltwaters.

"Something exciting about Europa in particular is that all six basic elements required for life have been detected there, as well as salts such as magnesium sulfate and sodium chloride," said McDonnell. "The gravitational pull of Jupiter is thought to cause subsurface tidal movement that weathers the rocky core, releasing nutrients into the ocean. So, if microbes on Earth have successfully evolved strategies to tolerate extremely cold and saline conditions, maybe Europa's subsurface ocean could host microbial life, too."

McDonnell is from North Carolina and did her undergraduate studies at Davidson College. She had never traveled outside her home state until 2021, when she came to MSU for an NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates Program, or REU, directed by associate professor Frank Stewart, also in the Department of Microbiology and Cell Biology, and Boyd. For 10 weeks, she worked with graduate student Lisa Keller in the Boyd lab attempting to isolate a novel microorganism from a Yellowstone hot spring, sparking her desire to continue studying extremophiles at MSU.

"I knew nothing about grad school prior to the REU," she recalled. "It was my first exposure to both the field of environmental microbiology and the world of academia. I definitely wouldn't be pursuing a PhD if I hadn't had the opportunity to work with Lisa and Eric that summer."

With her FINESST funding, McDonnell will sample microbes from briny, cold environments to determine which are successful there. She'll then expose the organisms she finds in those environments to geochemical conditions similar to those on Europa, thereby helping scientists understand how life might survive there.

McDonnell's undergraduate degree is in biology, guided by her longtime curiosity about the origin and evolution of life on Earth. Like Antill, she is applying knowledge from several scientific disciplines to microbiology. Both said that Boyd's lab is an ideal place to do just that.

"I was really drawn to Eric's ecological perspective of microbiology, which allows the lab to pursue big-picture questions about the evolution of microbial life on Earth." said McDonnell. "I love that I get to combine molecular biology, geochemistry, genomics, and ecological theory in my day-to-day research and coursework.

"I'm excited to apply skills I have developed in the Boyd lab this past year and continue to grow as a scientist as I begin my FINESST project."