Detecting Life Beyond Earth with Biodiversity-Inspired Metrics: Organic Richness and Evenness

To the point

Fabian Klenner and Gideon Yoffe propose a life-detection method that looks at how organic molecules are organized rather than at a single biosignature, applying richness and evenness metrics to amino acids and fatty acids across diverse samples to show that living systems are more diverse and uneven in amino acids while abiotic fatty acids are more evenly distributed, a pattern that persists from well-preserved to fossilized materials and could be used on mission data from Mars and beyond as an instrument-independent forensic framework that complements molecular searches and requires multiple lines of evidence.