Acetate: A better astrobiological indicator of life than methane?

The emergence of life on the ocean floor of the early Earth has implications for life detection on other rocky planetary bodies having subsurface ocean or ground waters in our solar system. At bottom life hydrogenates carbon dioxide. This is true not only of oxygenic photosynthesis—a relatively late evolutionary invention—but also of autotrophic chemosynthesizers such as the acetogenic bacteria and the methanoarchaea; respectively probably the first and second organisms to have emerged on Earth. Both of these prokaryotes use the acetyl coenzyme-a pathway for biosynthesis, though the variant leading to methanogenesis is substantially more complicated and therefore more highly evolved. Yet serpentinization and volcanism can produce methane with facility—an ambiguity that confounds life detection. In contrast, hydrothermal vent experiments to date along with hot spring analyses have indicated that no significant concentrations of abiotic acetate were produced in spite of the simplicity of the biological pathway. It seems that the geochemical conditions that generate abiotic methane are generally too reducing to produce acetate. Thus, the generation of acetate is solely a biotic process. As there is every reason to believe that the same chemical and electrochemical tensions would occur on other wet rocky planets containing subsurface ocean or ground waters. This encourages us to look into chemical and spectroscopic methods of detecting of acetate (both remotely and in situ) which is a better indicator than methane for the past or present biological activity on planetary bodies such as Mars. We, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, have designed laboratory experiments to investigate the feasibility of detecting acetate using conventional chemical and spectroscopic methods. The results and applicability of these techniques for the future astrobiology missions will be discussed.