NASA Astrobiology Institute

The NASA Astrobiology Institute ( NAI) is a research institute founded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in 1998, with the aim of promoting astrobiology and her serving space flight missions.

The NAI is a virtual organization; its 700 members are members of about 150 different facilities (as of January 2009) and organized into 14 research groups. The Director and a small core team have their jobs in the Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. The Institute has a budget of 16 million U.S. dollars ( 2008).

On 2 December 2010 the Institute announced that it has discovered the first organisms that can metabolize arsenic. The microorganisms GFAJ -1 were found by the research in the Mono Lake in California.