The Astrobiology Center for Isotopologue Research (ACIR) is funded by NASA Astrobiology. Our center includes world-leading experts, postdocs, and students involved in isotopic studies and analysis. Collectively, we seek to advance the analytical and computational capacity to study organic isotopologues. These are molecules that differ by the position of rare isotopes within the structure.

Our broader aim is to develop understanding of the biological and non-biological drivers for isotope patterns within and between molecules and to apply this rich resource of new information to potential biosignatures relevant to solar system and planetary exploration, and for studies of NASA-relevant Earth-life dynamics, both past and present.

Our team is comprised of researchers at Penn State, Caltech, University of Texas at El Paso, Lehigh University, University of Nantes, NASA Goddard, UC Riverside, and ELSI at Tokyo Tech.