Survival of an Antarctic cyanobacterial mat under Martian conditions

The purpose of this work is to find out what is the effect of the Martian conditions on an Antarctic cyanobacterial mat. We exposed an Antarctic microbial mat to Mars conditions in a simulating chamber (MARTE) for 15 days and investigated the variations in the consortium by the use of rRNA 16S gene expression as an indicator of the biological activity. Metabarcoding using the V3-V4 regions of rRNA 16S gene was used to determine the succession of the active members of the microbial consortium during the experiment.