We can reliably measure salt tolerance

In our previous engineering roadmap post, we described how we were planning to make polyextremophiles (🧂😵🥶☢️) that can thrive on Mars. A critical step of our plan is to create assays 📏 that are both feasible and quantitative, because it’s impossible to get traction and do good science unless you can reliably measure the values that matter.

In our experience there’s often a before and after to having good measurements. It’s like switching on the light in a darkened room, where you start to be able to see things and make progress that would have been impossible before. We call this traction, and it’s an idea both Erika and Devon have written about before. Traction is when you have questions to answer and the tools to answer them. It’s the place where good science happens.

Today we’re glad to share that we’ve achieved traction! We can precisely and reliably 📏 measure the 🧂salt tolerance of bacteria in liquid culture. If you want to see the other approaches we tried, we’ve included data on failed experiments, as well as some lessons learned. Finally, we’re teasing how we use this assay to measure improved salt tolerance in strains we have genetically engineered with functional genomics.