Poster Session - Abstract # 17
Capillary Electrophoresis Analysis of Cellular Metabolites for In Situ Life Detection on Ocean Worlds
Emily A. Kurfman1,2, Maria F. Mora3, Peter A. Willis3, and Susan M. Lunte1,2,4
1Department of Chemistry, 2Ralph N. Adams Institute for Bioanalytical Chemistry, 4Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, The University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, USA; 3Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA
In the future, space exploration missions will likely focus on ocean worlds, such as Europa (a moon of Jupiter) and Enceladus (a moon of Saturn), to search for possible signatures of life associated with their liquid water oceans. To detect and profile the chemical composition of any single-celled life that might be discovered, it is necessary to develop cell analysis methods that are compatible with spaceflight missions. These methods must be able to enrich and lyse cells, and extract and analyze their content using analytical methods that are compatible with spaceflight. As a result, we are developing hardware that can be used to concentrate and electrically lyse cells for subsequent analysis by capillary electrophoresis (CE) with multiple detection methods. CE is a useful technique for the separation of small, charged biomolecules, and could be made portable for spaceflight. It is also compatible with various detection methods including UV-visible absorption spectroscopy, capacitively coupled contactless conductivity detection (C4D), and mass spectrometry (MS). A combined CE-C4D-UV method using a background electrolyte of 2 M acetic acid was developed for separation of a mixture of biomolecules present in cells that are positively charged under these conditions, and this method was applied to analysis of E. coli cultures. Initially, standard methods for cell metabolite extraction were evaluated that could then be used for comparison of extraction efficiency to our cell lysis devices. Several E. coli cell samples were extracted using different solvent mixtures, including 80/20 methanol/water and 2 M acetic acid. The results showed that many cell metabolites can be extracted using these solvents and analyzed using our CE method. Currently, 3D-printed devices are being designed and prototyped to be evaluated for cell concentration and lysis. In the future, CE-MS will be used with these lysis methods to provide more conclusive identification of cellular metabolites.