International space station1/25/2024 ![]() That is about 100 times greater than the number of swabs in typical microbial tracking studies, which usually focus on the most suspect parts of a living space such as kitchens, bathrooms and exercise areas. In February astronaut Kate Rubins swabbed 1,000 different locations throughout the ISS. ![]() San Diego could help mitigate the microbial threat. The new project launched by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and U.C. Bacteria that have slipped Earth’s surly bonds can also become more resistant to antibiotics-a recipe for disaster, given the fact that long-duration spaceflight tends to weaken astronauts’ immune systems. In 2006 a team of scientists sent a culture of salmonella bacteria for an 11-day ride on the space shuttle Atlantis only to find that once the microbes returned to Earth, they more easily killed mice. “Those are the kinds of consequences that could materialize.” “Can you imagine you’re on a long flight and all of the sudden you start to get, let’s say, a flesh-eating bacterium, and you can’t get rid of it?” Dorrestein says. Yet, counter to the notion of space as a sterile, inert environment, any spacecraft will inevitably host an assortment of microbes in numbers sufficient to make any astronaut’s skin crawl.Ī spacecraft’s microbiome could prove hazardous to the health of the astronauts. Auñón-Chancellor, who is both a physician and a NASA astronaut. “I never pictured an inanimate object-a machine that works beautifully like the station-as having a microbiome similar to someone who’s alive, like a human,” says Serena M. In 1998-about three years before the station deorbited into the Pacific Ocean-scientists discovered several dozen species of bacteria, fungi and dust mites hiding behind a service panel. Take the Russian space station Mir as an example. But scientists are not only worried about the human microbiome-they are also worried about the spacecraft’s microbiome. It might not come as a surprise, then, that understanding how the microbiome behaves during spaceflight is crucial if we want to send astronauts on long-term missions to Mars and beyond. ![]() Most of these minuscule creatures are actually essential and have such far-reaching impacts on our health-affecting our immunity, our heart and perhaps even our mental health-that scientists often refer to the microbiome as an “invisible organ.” In fact, the microbial multitudes within us are so numerous that their total mass can add up to roughly the weight of our brain. “You can think of people as walking ecosystems,” says Pieter Dorrestein, a chemical biologist at University of California, San Diego. ![]() From the bacteria lining our guts to the too-small-to-see mites living at the base of our eyelashes, it is estimated that there are at least as many microbes on and within us as there are human cells. This effort at a space-based microbial census is the first step toward understanding, preventing and mitigating dangerous outbreaks-whether they arise onboard the station, during long-duration flights toward Mars or even back home in hospitals. Last month astronauts collected samples from across the interior of the ISS to build an unprecedented three-dimensional map of its microbiome. New studies, however, are designed to change that. We do not even know the full spectrum of spacefaring species living onboard the International Space Station (ISS). Yet we are still mostly in the dark about how these communities of microscopic hitchhikers react to microgravity. Each person voyaging off-world is accompanied by up to 100 trillion bacteria, viruses and other microorganisms, any number of which could jeopardize human health.
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