From the Article

>Engineers at the University of California, Irvine said microbes could help colonize the Moon and Mars. Inspired by the cyanobacteria that acquire nutrients from rocks in Chile’s Atacama Desert, they also see the findings as a step toward employing microorganisms in large-scale 3D printing or additive manufacturing at a scale suitable for civil engineering in challenging locations such as the Moon and Mars.
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>As mentioned by the university, high-resolution electron microscopy and cutting-edge spectroscopic imaging methods were used by researchers from the Departments of Materials Science and Engineering at UC Irvine and Johns Hopkins University to gain a thorough understanding of how microorganisms modify both naturally occurring minerals and artificial nanoceramics.