Innerspace Science

Enabling Exploration of Deep Sea Micro Worlds: An Integrative New Baseline Capacity

Innerspace will link institutions, scientists, engineers, technology partners, tech start-ups and incubators, corporate partners, and nonprofits with program initiatives – to originate, enable, and facilitate new approaches to microscopic and nanoscopic imaging together with precision bio-sampling in deep sea habitats, and for top-side molecular and genomic analyses.

This transdisciplinary approach will cut across disciplinary silos and bring together fresh thinking about what is technologically possible for deep sea exploration at environmental extremes. Creating a new deep-sea capacity baseline of infrastructure and organization will enable exploration of a range of cross-cutting questions and applications about life’s ability to survive and thrive in extreme environments. 

Innerspace Working Groups will provide the research framework for these investigations and will shape the technologies that are developed, adapted, and deployed to enable this work.

Innerspace Workshops & Workflows

Innerspace will establish a workshop process for each Science Working Group to develop a series of far-reaching questions to be addressed by Innerspace for each area of investigation.

Some questions may overlap between Working Groups. From this process a “scientific map” of Innerspace science questions and priorities will be generated, and how these questions intersect and align between Working Group topics (Figure1).

The Technology Working Groups will then collaborate to explore and co-design cross-cutting technologies that can answer core questions, including with robotics, observing technologies, and in situ instruments that can be uniquely adapted, built, and deployed for deep sea investigation.

Generating a “Scientific Map” for Innerspace Discovery

Four Science Working Groups and four Technology Working Groups have been designed as follows, with summaries of Working Group rationale from the project's strategic plan: 

Science Working Groups

Working Group 1

Deep Sea Biodiversity & Conservation

Extreme Ecosystems, Adaptation & Survival on a Changing Planet

Chair: Jeffrey Marlow, PhD, Assistant Professor of Biology, Research Fellow, Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering, Boston University

Working Group 1 objectives will be to deploy new deep sea micro-to-nano scale imaging, micro-spatial biogeochemical measurements, and precision sampling systems, coupled with omics approaches (genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics) in surface labs to answer questions about early life history, evolution, and physiology of deep sea life, including the biophysical mechanisms of adaptation to extreme environments and conditions, microbial diversity, genetic diversity, the “rare biosphere” (1,2,3), ecosystem productivity, and ecosystem resilience within these environments.

This effort will focus on benthic abyssal-pelagic habitats and unique ocean environments including hydrothermal vent systems, hypersaline pools, anoxic habitats, hydrocarbon seeps, and sub-seafloor habitats.

This research will also reveal the impacts of, and potential behavioral responses to, global shifts in climate and ocean chemistry, increasing resource extraction, pollution, and other human impacts. A greater understanding of these habitats will also be linked with policy-making efforts to support decisions about resource management and conservation efforts in light of these impacts. Application of such research outcomes are increasingly critical for developing sustainable policies in the context of climate mitigation and emerging international frameworks and agreements on the future of deep sea mining, the United Nations “High Seas” Treaty, and other activities (4).

Working Group 2

Astrobiology & Origin of Life

Exoplanetary/Deep Sea Analogues, Biosignatures & Models of Life’s Emergence

The distribution of life on Earth is heterogeneous according to where resources are clustered, capacity for physical movement of materials, and other factors. Understanding the dynamics and processes that drive this distribution on Earth can be applied to environments beyond Earth to predict how materials present in exoplanetary atmospheres and surfaces might be similarly distributed and subsequently detectable as biosignatures (5).

The dominant and most common environments and habitats that support life on Earth, however, may not be common elsewhere, and more rare and extreme environments found on Earth likely abound on icy moons in our solar system and in exoplanets and ocean worlds beyond our solar system. Defining the potential array of planetary analogues of Earth systems and life forms for exoplanetary exploration and life detection should therefore include the broadest range of systems and organisms found here on Earth as a baseline, including those that thrive in extreme environments found in the deep sea (6).

Further, the need for integrating diverse measurements on a single sample, required to meet life detection criteria on future planetary space missions, has motivated calls for greater research and technology collaboration to develop common “front end” methods for sampling, processing, and analysis with multiple instruments (7). The Innerspace 6000 OEV robotic instrument arm and its modular, multi-functional instrument deck will support the development of this approach.

The Innerspace Astrobiology and Origin of Life Working Group will collaborate with experts and working groups from other astrobiology programs to align the use of Innerspace infrastructure capacity and contribute to a larger science agenda.

Working Group 3

Marine Genetic Resources

Biotechnology for Human & Planetary Health

In order to survive in the harsh conditions of deep sea environmental extremes, organisms that thrive in these environments have evolved biochemical and physiological mechanisms that have no equivalent in other Earth habitats, especially compared with terrestrial habitats (8). Metabolic mechanisms of adaptation by deep sea extremophilic organisms have been found to produce secondary metabolites that have unique and potent biological activity with potential for biotechnical applications for medicines and human health, for industrial production and clean energy, for carbon capture, and synthetic biology.

As international treaties and instruments for conservation, and equitable and sustainable use of marine biodiversity, especially for areas beyond national jurisdiction (e.g. UN BBNJ treaty), become globally ratified and used in guiding the world’s use of marine genetic resources for new biotechnologies, there will continue to be a need to address important issues that challenge the sustainable and equitable use of these resources (9, 10), which the Innerspace project will help to address.

This effort is especially important when considering equitable access to potential economic and social benefits of new discoveries of marine genetic resources, with implications for novel drug discovery, carbon capture, energy production, sustainable resource management, and conservation.

A translational strategy for aligning Innerspace research with opportunities to partner with research institutes and the commercial sector, including partners within emerging economies, will be explored by the Marine Genetic Resources Working Group.

Working Group 4

Innerspace at the Micro-Spatial Scale

New Questions, New Technologies & a New Era of Discovery

Working Groups 1-3 will focus on defining important science questions emerging from each topic, informed by but not limited to observing and sampling technologies at hand. The Technology Working Groups will then develop a technology portfolio to address the science agenda, including with new and novel technologies and instruments.

Working from other side of the equation, Working Group 4 will start with a consideration of new and emerging technologies for biological and biophysical investigation across a range of applications, including from outside the realm of ocean science, to explore what can be brought to deep sea exploration, to answer new and long-standing questions. What can be investigated and understood with an adaptation and integration of new technologies embedded in new deep sea instruments?

The ability to integrate and link data from multiple technologies across Innerspace vehicle platforms, to explore crucial synergies at the micro scale, is an essential feature of the Innerspace concept.

Figure 2 illustrates the integration of multiple systems to be deployed on Innerspace platforms and designed to be used in tandem. We will explore how these new tools will “open the aperture” for the kinds of questions we can ask and their implications for engaging with other collaborators and institutions.

Technology Working Groups 

Working Group 5

Micro/Nano Imaging Systems

Working Group 6

Micro-Spatial Environmental Sensing

Working Group 7

Precision Sampling & Omics-Level Analyses

Working Group 8

Data Processing & AI/ML Applications

1. Caron, David A., and Peter D. Countway. "Hypotheses on the role of the protistan rare biosphere in a changing world." Aquatic Microbial Ecology 57.3 (2009): 227-238.

2. Pedrós-Alió, Carlos. "The rare bacterial biosphere." Annual review of marine science 4 (2012): 449-466.

3. Pascoal, Francisco, Rodrigo Costa, and Catarina Magalhães. "The microbial rare biosphere: current concepts, methods and ecological principles." FEMS Microbiology Ecology 97.1 (2021): fiaa227.

4. Howell, Kerry L., et al. "A blueprint for an inclusive, global deep-sea ocean decade field program." Frontiers in Marine Science 7 (2020): 999.

5. Ocean Sciences Across the Solar System initiative, a white paper produced by NASA’s Network for Ocean Worlds (NOW), a NASA Astrobiology Research Coordination Network (RCN). Available at: https://oceanworlds.space/wp-content/uploads/sites/22/2022/02/Ocean-Sciences-Across-the-Solar-System_Final.pdf

6. Rothschild, Lynn J., and Rocco L. Mancinelli, “Life in extreme environments.” Nature 409.6823 (2001): 1092-1101.

7. Hoehler, Tori, et al. "Groundwork for life detection." Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society53.4 (2021): 202.

8. Saide, Assunta, Chiara Lauritano, and Adrianna Ianora. "A treasure of bioactive compounds from the deep sea." Biomedicines 9.11 (2021): 1556.

9. Blasiak, R., R. Wynberg, K. Grorud-Colvert, S. Thambisetty, et al. 2020. The Ocean Genome: Conservation and the Fair, Equitable and Sustainable Use of Marine Genetic Resources. Washington, DC: World Resources Institute.

10. Russo, Patrizia, Alessandra Del Bufalo, and Massimo Fini. "Deep sea as a source of novel-anticancer drugs: Update on discovery and preclinical/clinical evaluation in a systems medicine perspective." EXCLI journal 14 (2015): 228.