Carbon

2FP got its start when we realized that humanity’s two greatest frontiers — our oceans and outer space — share a molecular challenge: carbon dioxide. Most of Earth’s CO₂ is naturally absorbed by the ocean, but changes in atmospheric composition are altering marine chemistry in ways that impact vital ecosystems and the economies that depend on them. Meanwhile, Mars — our next destination for human exploration — is dominated by a CO₂-rich atmosphere. Even in Earth orbit, CO₂ buildup inside spacecraft poses risks to astronaut health. To support life both on this planet and beyond, we need microbes that can take these compounds and convert them into something useful.

The Two Frontiers Project is investigating extreme, carbon-rich environments on Earth to uncover microorganisms that have evolved natural mechanisms for processing CO₂ and methane. These microbes may hold the key to developing next-generation technologies for closed-loop life support systems, ecosystem stabilization, and converting greenhouse gases into useful bioproducts.

Our field sites include submarine volcanic CO₂ seeps — places where the ocean floor vents carbon dioxide at concentrations far above ambient, creating intense selective pressure on the microbial communities that live there. These communities have evolved over millions of years under precisely the conditions we are trying to engineer in the laboratory. They are, in effect, nature’s prototype for converting carbon into something useful.

The deliverables from this work are threefold: a catalog of novel carbon-fixation and methane-oxidation genes and pathways that don’t appear in existing databases, a collection of cultured strains available for downstream biotechnology development and bioproduction, and a framework for identifying similar organisms in other extreme environments around the world.