Pluto is the microbiology side of Charon. Melanised fungi and other polyextremophiles thrive around Chernobyl's Reactor No. 4, the Nevada test site and operating reactor pools, and may use melanin to tolerate, or even harvest, ionising radiation. No one has looked for them at Maralinga or Emu Field. Pluto asks what lives there, is it unique and what could its pigments be used for.
Work so far
- Metagenomic study design: 16S amplicon sequencing with random-forest classification (after MacGregor et al., 2024), currently weighing on-site field sequencing on an Oxford Nanopore MinION against WSU's Hawkesbury NGS Facility.
- Equipment:
- Zymo Research Soil DNA kit
- a 1600CPS centrifuge
- Archimedes Em1 Field Microscope
- Photomicroscopy Z-mount
- Nikon Z5II
- OM TG-7
- Cast modular Bismuth/Tin shielding.
- A radiotolerant atlas: published growth thresholds and ideal doses for radiotrophic organisms, superimposed on historical contamination across Maralinga and Emu Field.
- BIOS2024 Policy brief, Microbes as Threats and Tools for Australian Nuclear Infrastructure (2026): microbial corrosion of reactors, military vessels and spacecraft, and three uses for extremophile pigments: radioresistant materials, biosensing and bioremediation, and radioprophylactics.