The proposed work is the result of a collaboration across multiple institutions formed at the NASA biosignatures ideas lab held in february 2024

This proposal aims to evaluate motility as an agnostic biosignature. Agnostic biosignatures are important for detecting microbial life for which we do not know the biochemical composition and are relevant for potentially habitable worlds beyond earth such as mars europa enceladus and titan. Motility is a potential composition-independent biosignature as all microbial life on earth either moves or grows in some way. What is unknown however is whether life-like movement can be distinguished from nonlife movement such as brownian motion wind evaporation freezing and acceleration due to gravity. Using a combination of timelapse light microscopy image analysis algorithms and a comprehensive validation framework this proposal aims to answer the question: are we able to characterize biotic movement as a biochemistry-independent agnostic biosignature? Major gaps in the evaluation of movement as an agnostic biosignature include a lack of studies on types of movement other than flagellar motility and comparison of biological movement with non-biological movement and movement of abiotic material. We aim to address this GAP by using microscopy and advanced image analysis techniques including optical flow to identify other movements as a marker or behavior of living things.