Professor Malcolm Walter has been making a name for himself for decades, poking around amongst the fossilised stromatolites found in the Pilbara in WA and finding out just how long life has existed on Earth. He still does this but has turned much of his attention to Mars, where he hopes that his findings about early microbial life on Earth will help find life elsewhere in the universe.

While Walter looks at the fossil stromatolites, the oldest of which have been pinpointed at 3.43 billion years, Professor Brett Neilan and his colleagues look at the living ones. At the relocated ACA, a multidisciplinary team has now been formed involving biologists, geologists, palaeontologists, physicists and astronomers. At the official launch in late May, the guest of honour, astronaut Dr Andy Thomas, said the centre will help to answer some of the most profoundly important questions about how life began on this planet.

“I can think of little more important question than that as we, one species of this immense universe, should strive to answer,” Thomas said. “It will affect the understanding of ourselves, it would dramatically change our culture, our communities, our philosophy, our religion and the way we grow as people. It would be a step towards bringing us closer to that essential truth that is so often pursued by poets.”

While Brett Neilan, the ACA’s deputy director, is unsure of exactly what he is – geneticist, micro or molecular biologist, environmental scientist, favourite of graduate students – he is probably not a poet. What he does know a lot about is cyanobacteria, research that has seen him awarded a Eureka Prize for research in 2001, the Fenner Medal from the Australian Academy of Science in 2004; another Eureka Prize, this time with Walter and Brendan Burns, in 2005; and last year’s Australian Society of Microbiology Frank Fenner Award, for which he delivered the ASM Fenner Lecture recently.

It has also scored him several ARC grants and, earlier this year, a much-sought after Federation Fellowship, part of which he will use to send some of his PhD students to extreme environments in search of bacteria.

Cyanobacteria are the ubiquitous, ancient and potentially deadly prokaryotes that not only produce much of the oxygen that we breathe and form stromatolites but which also have a habit of fouling up our waterways and causing toxic damage to animals and humans.

Neilan has been able to track down the genetic signature of several of these toxins and has helped develop diagnostic kits to discover which one is responsible when an algal bloom breaks out. This knowledge, predominantly concerned with the toxins produced by freshwater cyanobacteria but which is moving into marine toxins, not only has huge environmental and safety importance but is also being applied to pharmacology and drug development.

An understanding of cyanobacteria will also help if – or when – life is found on other planets. As the ACA was being officially opened, NASA’s Mars Lander touched down, armed with a shovel and the mission of digging for ice. If water is there, bacteria or some other microbe might be there, something that Malcolm Walter is rather keen on finding out.

He is a member of an international group planning the first two-way mission to Mars, sometime after 2018, which aims to return samples to Earth. “If there is life out there it is most likely to be microbial,” he says.