Extreme environments are natural laboratories for discovering microbial diversity, stress-adaptation mechanisms, and biological functions with applications on Earth and beyond. Deserts, hypersaline systems, volcanic soils, oil-impacted environments, mangroves, deep-sea brines, and hydrothermal systems host microorganisms capable of tolerating combinations of stress such as desiccation, salinity, radiation, nutrient limitation, hydrocarbons, metals, pressure, and temperature fluctuations. This project will use KAUST’s Planetary Simulation Chamber and the MEGB Lab microbial culture collection to explore how selected extremophilic microorganisms and microbial communities respond to controlled environmental and planetary-analog stresses. The project will combine microbial cultivation, chamber-based exposure experiments, genome and metagenome mining, and sequence-to-function analysis to identify microbial traits relevant to astrobiology, environmental biotechnology, bioremediation, plant growth under arid and saline conditions, plastic biotransformation, and microbial-based solutions. Depending on the student’s background, the internship may focus on one or more integrated modules: calibration and characterization of the Planetary Simulation Chamber; exposure of selected isolates or microbial communities to mild Mars-like or extreme environmental conditions; recovery and characterization of stress-tolerant microorganisms; and computational mining of genomes and metagenomes for stress-response genes, biosynthetic gene clusters, mobile genetic elements, hydrocarbon-degradation pathways, plant-growth-promoting traits, and plastic-active enzymes. The student will gain hands-on experience at the interface of microbial ecology, extremophile biology, astrobiology, environmental microbiology, planetary simulation, genomics, metagenomics, and bioinformatics. The project contributes to a broader effort to explore extreme microbial diversity as a source of biological insight and microbial-based solutions for a hotter Earth and future space exploration.

-Calibrated and documented experimental workflow for selected Planetary Simulation Chamber conditions. -Cultivation and/or recovery data for selected extremophilic isolates or microbial communities exposed to environmental or planetary-analog stresses. -DNA extraction, sequencing preparation, and/or genome/metagenome analysis of selected samples, depending on project duration and student background. -Bioinformatic summary of candidate microbial traits, including stress-response genes, biosynthetic gene clusters, hydrocarbon-degradation pathways, plant-growth-promoting traits, plastic-active enzymes, and potential biosignature-related features. -Final internship report and short presentation summarizing methods, results, interpretation, and recommended next steps.