The investigators collected samples of burned materials from the house and sent them to a laboratory that could detect the presence of a liquid accelerant.
That project will seek to return samples of organic materials from an asteroid to help scientists understand how the building blocks for life may have been seeded on the early Earth.
Prof van der Meer says the bacterial-based kits cope well with multiple samples, require fewer materials than standard chemical testing field kits, and are easy to prepare.
But the samples we collected from it we believe to be exactly the same materials that went into forming the comets and the solar system four and a half billion years ago.
Researchers have already become much better at understanding how the structure of new nano-engineered materials will behave, although the process remains largely one of trial and error because different samples have to be repeatedly manufactured and tested.