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Sneaky New Bacteria on the ISS Could Build a Future on Mars

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researchers announced that they’d found an hiding aboard the International Space Station. And they were cool with that.In fact, for an organization known for a sophisticated public communications strategy—Mars rovers don’t write their own tweets, is what I’m saying—everyone was pretty quiet about this discovery.Almost too quiet.It’s true that the new life wasn’t, say, a xenomorphic alien with acid for blood. It was a novel species of bacteria, unknown on Earth but whose genes identified it as coming from a familiar terrestrial genus called Methylobacterium. Typically its members like to hang out amid the roots of plants, not on the walls of space stations. Still, you’d think a probably-not-but-maybe-evolved-in-space microbe would merit a little more freaking out. Yet here we are. Nobody was exactly surprised—and the reasons why could define the future of human space exploration.As part of an ongoing research project into the microbial life of the ISS, astronauts onboard in 2015 and 2016 swabbed down various parts of the station and sent home the wipes they used. Over the next couple of years down here on Earth, a team of researchers headquartered at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Biotechnology and Planetary Protection Group isolated the microbes and sequenced their genes. One species, found on a HEPA filter in the station’s life-support system, was a garden-variety (literally!) Methylobacterium rhodesianum. But three samples—from a surface near the materials research rack, a wall near the “cupola” of windows, and the astronauts' dining table—were something new. The researchers running the project named it M. ajmalii.It wasn’t even the first time these researchers found a new bacterium in space. They’d already found a in that set of ISS samples—they published a paper on that in 2017. There’s a chance that these bugs are in some sense aliens, that they evolved on the station. But it’s a thin one. Odds are they hitched a ride on cargo, or on astronauts, and the microbe hunters only noticed them because they went looking. “There are chances of evolution in space, no doubt, but the space station is so young. It’s only 20 years old. Bacteria might not have evolved in that span of time,” says Kasthuri Venkateswaran, the JPL microbiologist running the project.What’s more interesting, maybe, is figuring out which bacteria are zeroes on Earth but heroes in the rarified, closed-loop environment of a spaceship. That’s why studying the International Space Station’s microbiome—the bacteria, fungi, and viruses that thrive on board—might be critical to the safety of missions to Mars, or permanent bases on other worlds. As on Earth, human health in space will depend in part on a healthy microbiome and a good relationship with the microbiome of the vessel or shelter. “We’re able to say that novel species carried by the crew might have some characteristics to withstand the conditions there,” Venkateswaran says. “The rest might have died. These are the things that survive.”Most Popular quite unpleasant. Outside a vessel or vacuum suit, it’d be a race to see if you died first from suffocation or freeze-drying. (The high levels of hard radiation are more of a long-term deal breaker.)So the insides of those vessels and suits have to be closed systems. The only things that come and go are cargo and astronauts. But wherever people go, they bring their ride-along microbes with them—in their guts, on their skin, in their noses and mouths. That’s true in your house, and it’s true on the ISS. But the ISS is not like your house, and not just because it recycles air and water and you can’t open the windows. The air on the ISS is drier, with higher levels of carbon dioxide. Radiation levels are higher. There’s no gravity to speak of. (“We’re used to certain kinds of microbes staying on the floor, but they don’t stay on the floor if there is no floor,” says John Rummel, a former NASA Planetary Protection Officer, responsible for keeping aliens off of Earth and Earth life off of other places.) It smells not-so-fresh inside the ISS, and because it’s full of nooks and crannies that water droplets can float into and then adhere to, thanks to surface tension, it has lots of places where microbes can hang out.In practice, that means that the environmental microbiome of the ISS looks a lot like the microbiome of the astronauts who live there. It even changes when the crews change, according to a . Those researchers looked at skin, nose, and gut microbes from nine astronauts who spent anywhere from a few months to, in one famous case, on the ISS—comparing them to before- and after-mission samples, and to samples from the station itself. “Wall samples really looked like astronaut skin. The air filters really looked like astronaut nasal microbiomes,” says Alexander Voorhies, a consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton who was lead author of the paper, back when he was a staff scientist at the J. Craig Venter Institute. “The stuff in the air was different from the stuff on regularly handled objects.”Still, the environment of the station (and presumably a Mars mission or a Mars base) is friendlier to some bacteria and fungi than others. No one really knows which. There are hints—just hints—that microgravity and the other weird conditions inside the ISS can change gene expression in bacteria, the snapshot of the biochemical things the bugs are doing to survive. Grown on the ISS, the laboratory workhorse bacterium Escherichia coli actually got than under similar conditions on Earth, for example. Now, to be sure, that’s not actually evolution; the changes have to become permanent and passed on to subsequent generations for that. But it’s potentially a beginning. “Give them any stress, and they’re going to evolve,” says Anushree Chatterjee, a chemical and biological engineer at the University of Colorado and one of the authors of the E. coli paper. “You find these very hardy bacteria that can survive on the inner surfaces of the International Space Station. Resources are limited. Food is limited. So they will find new ways to grow.” (Those survivors have one real advantage: There probably isn’t much trying to eat them, either.)Most PopularUp in the macrobiome, though, the ISS is demonstrably unfriendly to humans. Just living there suppresses some immune responses. Astronauts have had reactivations of Epstein-Barr and varicella-zoster viral infections—a function of a change in immune status. Astronauts have earned a reputation for underplaying medical complaints, yet ISS crew frequently skin rashes and upper respiratory infections as their most “notable” clinical issues, according to a 2016 survey.It’s a potentially dangerous mix: Rare bacteria acquiring new skills and astronauts less able to fend off infection. NASA used to study all this by sampling and then trying to grow whatever they caught. Genetic sequencing techniques have made the hunt even more precise, because scientists can find bugs in smaller numbers than before. Eventually, NASA hopes to fly gene-sequencing devices on the missions themselves; in 2016, astronaut Kate Rubins for the first time, and she’s actually back on the ISS right now.The idea is to use those technologies to look for microbes that are—or have become—pathogenic. “Microbiome monitoring might be a good way to detect perturbations as a result of exposure to the Martian environment, or to a potential Martian organism,” says Andy Spry, a senior scientist at the SETI Institute and a planetary protection consultant for NASA. “That said, we have a ways to go in our understanding of monitoring microbial communities in a spacecraft and in humans before we can use such an approach.” found undiscovered bacteria from the ISS and on Earth, in space vehicle assembly rooms. The fact that those are also referred to as “clean rooms” should tell you why that’s seemingly not so great. But unlike lots of those other novel species, this new ISS Methylobacterium might actually be useful. That genus is best known for things like helping with nitrogen fixation, turning complex nitrogen sources in soil into something a plant can use as a nutrient, which means it could help food grow on another world. Plus, M. ajmalii can resist high levels of radiation, and survive when it’s totally dried out, in a sort of suspended animation. In short, this little guy is better at space travel than any human. “We want to take advantage of this and see if we can grow it in simulated lunar soil or Martian regolith,” Venkateswaran says. “It might provide nutrients. That would be good, because we cannot take soil along with us to the moon and Mars. We have to depend on the soil there.”Even if a bacterium like this new one can turn sterile Martian dust into potting soil, that won’t be the only challenge. Astronauts take their microbiome with them wherever they go, the everyday carry of the bacterial world. A vessel like the ISS or a Mars-bound SpaceX Unlimited presents a kind of evolutionary bottleneck for those bugs—only some survive the trip, but those that do are perfectly adapted to the environment. A landing on Mars would create a similar bottleneck, a similar filter of life-finds-a-way-ness. Lots of them will die. But some will turn out to be eminently suited for a new life in the off-world colonies, a golden land of opportunity and adventure. So humans will somehow have to keep the bacteria that might be best suited for life on Mars from getting into the Martian environment and taking over … but also figure out which bacteria can help build a sustainable outpost. And jumping the fence is almost inevitable. “You’re going to out-gas. You’re going to leak some microbes. So how do you control them? You need to have the appropriate habitat to live, but spacesuits are bound to leak,” Venkateswaran says. “Those that survive may be one in a million, and that is going to proliferate.”Most PopularThat risk, combined with the thin chance of some microbe turning dangerously pathogenic on a space mission, might be why nobody made much noise about the latest novel bacteria from the ISS. JPL is famously cagey when it comes to talking about the station’s microbes. Maybe Venkateswaran’s latest discovery will make them a little more willing. A bacterium that could survive on the surface of Mars would have to be able to deal with hard radiation, lack of oxygen, killer perchlorates and oxides in the regolith, and no water (except maybe seasonally, in some places on the planet). Maybe one that learns to live on the ISS could do all that in a controlled way—keeping people safe on Mars, and keeping Mars safe from us.More Great WIRED Stories writes about science and miscellaneous geekery. Before coming to WIRED, Rogers was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT and a reporter for Newsweek. He is the author of The New York Times science bestseller Proof: The Science of Booze.

researchers announced that they’d found an hiding aboard the International Space Station. And they were cool with that.In fact, for an organization known for a sophisticated public communications strategy—Mars rovers don’t write their own tweets, is what I’m saying—everyone was pretty quiet about this discovery.Almost too quiet.It’s true that the new life wasn’t, say, a xenomorphic alien with acid for blood. It was a novel species of bacteria, unknown on Earth but whose genes identified it as coming from a familiar terrestrial genus called Methylobacterium. Typically its members like to...

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Senior Correspondent/Wired. Full Spectrum: How the Science of Color Made Us Modern https://indiebound.org/book/9781328518903 adam_rogers@wired.com

Adam Rogers

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Sneaky New Bacteria on the ISS Could Build a Future on Mars

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