Scientists locked away in a remote secret laboratory load up a space craft with non to semi-deadly bacteria, viruses and germs of varying toxicity. They blast them off into the great regions of outer space. Eventually, the rocket tumbles into the planet Earth’s atmosphere with a cargo of super-charged, lethal, deadly germs out to reap havoc on all the inhabitants of the small blue orb called Earth.
Sound like a plot from an old 1950’s sci-fi movie? Well, it may be more true that poorly written fiction.
NASA scientists have discovered something they weren’t quite expecting now that the space shuttle Atlantis has returned to Earth with its precious cargo of bacterial samples that were on board the International Space Station for several months.
It would seem that the salmonella samples, the bug that commonly causes food poisoning here on the planet, came back more potent and deadlier than their Earth-bound counterparts.
Lab rats fed the space cultured samonella were three times more likely to get sick, and died more quickly, than mice fed identical germs that had remained behind on Earth. After 25 days, 40% of the mice given the earthbound salmonella were still alive, while over the same period only 10% of those administerd the space samonella survived. Scientists discovered that the amount of bacteria it took to kill half the mice was three times larger for the normal salmonella than for the space borne bacteria.
“Wherever humans go, microbes go, you can’t sterilize humans. Wherever we go, under the oceans or orbiting the earth, the microbes go with us, and it’s important that we understand how they’re going to change,” explained Cheryl Nickerson, an associate professor at the Center for Infectious Diseases and Vaccinology at Arizona State University.
And change they did, and not in a good way.
Both test sets of samonella were kept under similiar conditions of temperature, etc., with the one exception being that the ISS samples were in weightless orbit around the planet.
167 genes had undergone significant change in the salmonella that went to space and the group of NASA researchers currently don’t have a clue as to why this has occured. They are playing with the theory of something called “Fluid Shear.” This phenomena happens in low to no gravity in which the force of passing liquid over cells is extremely low compared with that occuring in normal gravity bound cells. However, whether are not this is the true cause of the change in the bacteria is all conjecture at this point.
What is known of certainty is that as in all things, whether it takes place on Earth, underground, deep in our oceans or in outer space, living things adapt to change in order to survive and this could be one survival mechanism employed on the cellular level in these bacteria.
“These bugs can sense where they are by changes in their environment. The minute they sense a different environment, they change their genetic machinery so they can survive,” Nickerson said.
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