2020 Fiscal Year Research-status Report
The viability of Earth-life on other planets
| Project/Area Number |
19K23459
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| Research Institution | Tokyo Institute of Technology |
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Principal Investigator |
Smith Harrison 東京工業大学, 地球生命研究所, 研究員 (50843934)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2019-08-30 – 2022-03-31
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| Keywords | Astrobiology / Metabolism / Networks / Complex Systems / Software |
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| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
The second year of my research grant was impacted by COVID-19 by not being able to meet with collaborators, or disseminate results through in-person talks or conferences. However, I was able to publish an Astrobiology paper (Seeding Biochemistry on Other Worlds: Enceladus as a Case Study), continue developing the cornerstone software packages that enabled this publication's results, and begin developing follow-up projects and collaborations.
The two software packages I developed with collaborators that have enabled my research are 1. ECG, a package to collect and parse biochemical and omic data and 2. BioXP, a package to run the core network expansion analyses, which provides data on which environments are suitable to different genomes and metagenomes. Besides increasing package maturity via additional testing and bug-fixes, I have optimized BioXP for significant speed improvements.
Collaborators at Arizona State University, USA are using these packages for their own research, extending the influence of innovative JSPS sponsored interdisciplinary research. Additionally, other research groups of have expressed interest in collaborating on related research questions, using these packages as a foundation for that work. These research groups include potential collaborators at CU Boulder, USA and locally at Tokyo Tech.
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| Current Status of Research Progress |
Current Status of Research Progress
3: Progress in research has been slightly delayed.
Reason
The world was turned upside down by COVID-19 this past fiscal year. This inhibited planned collaborations and conference activity. Unfortunately I cannot schedule resuming these activities until the government provides a vaccination plan. Despite these setbacks, I was still able to publish in the world's leading Astrobiology journal and improve the software that I developed.
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| Strategy for Future Research Activity |
I would like to begin new collaborations with colleagues across the globe in order to answer more questions about planetary viability for life, and in order to increase the user base of the important software that I developed. I would like to run more analyses, focusing on diverse microbial ecologies instead of simply individual organisms. I would like to network with colleagues and share results at workshops and conferences. I would like to publish results from new collaborations and analyses.
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| Causes of Carryover |
The funds are being used in the next year because they weren't fully spent last fiscal year due to restrictions from COVID-19.
The usage plan for my remaining budget is preferably to spend it on travel in order to work with collaborators and present at conferences, including at least one international conference or collaborator trip (using approximately 50-70% of my remaining budget). This is in part due to savings on computation related costs from optimization which I was able to develop, and will be increasingly possible when collaboratively developing the codebase. However, possible computation costs may including buying additional storage and cloud compute time (approximately 15-30% of my remaining budget). Additional funds will be used for publication costs (approximately 10-20% of my remaining budget). If conference or collaborator travel remains forbidden, I will instead spend that portion of my budget on software and computational tools.
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Research Products
(1 results)
