I am no biologist; I am unclear about the terms here.
Let say I have a piece of bread that has mold on it.
I leave it alone, the mold grows and consumes more of the bread.
The mold / fungi is "alive" in that it is growing and consuming.
Let us say that the fungi here was from moldy bread.
They shoot it into space, stuff it inside the lab and expose it to the
same environment.
Does survival then mean that it keeps eating more of the bread while
the experiment is taking place, so when they look at it afterwards
there is a lot more of it? But 40% of it has died?
Or does it mean that the cells making up the mold are entirely dormant
but is the DNA structure has remained intact for 60% of the mold and
the hypothesis is that if you brought it back to earth it would start
"being alive", growing, eating again?
>The most relevant outcome was that more than 60% of the cells of the endolithic communities studied remained intact after ‘exposure to Mars’, or rather, the stability of their cellular DNA was still high,”
Let say I have a piece of bread that has mold on it. I leave it alone, the mold grows and consumes more of the bread. The mold / fungi is "alive" in that it is growing and consuming.
Let us say that the fungi here was from moldy bread. They shoot it into space, stuff it inside the lab and expose it to the same environment.
Does survival then mean that it keeps eating more of the bread while the experiment is taking place, so when they look at it afterwards there is a lot more of it? But 40% of it has died?
Or does it mean that the cells making up the mold are entirely dormant but is the DNA structure has remained intact for 60% of the mold and the hypothesis is that if you brought it back to earth it would start "being alive", growing, eating again?
>The most relevant outcome was that more than 60% of the cells of the endolithic communities studied remained intact after ‘exposure to Mars’, or rather, the stability of their cellular DNA was still high,”