Are the Cyanobacteria Viable?
Now, the question is, when you do this to the cyanobacteria, are they viable? It’s all dried out. Did they survive the trip? To test this, we put these balls on sterilized soils in a greenhouse, wet up the soil, and what we found was that the cyanobacteria in the pellets were viable. They could escape onto the soil, and they could establish some substantial populations. That looked good. What was really surprising was we demonstrated the recovery of nitrogen fixation activity after three months of incubation. Now, this is sort of surprising for a number of reasons. First off, Jayne Belnap has said it takes hundreds of years, so that was interesting. The second thing that’s kind of interesting is that Microcoleus, the cyanobacterial strain we used, doesn’t have heterocysts. It’s not supposed to fix nitrogen, and the evidence is that it doesn’t. We have looked for the nitrogenase gene in Microcoleus and can’t find it. Hans Pearl has looked at this in cooperation with Jayne Belnap and has
