Microbes stranded in the International Space Station (ISS) are just trying to survive, man.
A new Northwestern University study has found that -- despite its seemingly harsh conditions -- the ISS is not causing bacteria to mutate into dangerous, antibiotic-resistant superbugs.
While the team found that the bacteria isolated from the ISS did contain different genes than their Earthling counterparts, those genes did not make the bacteria more detrimental to human health. The bacteria are instead simply responding, and perhaps evolving, to survive in a stressful environment.
"There has been a lot of speculation about radiation, microgravity and the lack of ventilation and how that might affect living organisms, including bacteria," said Northwestern's Erica Hartmann, who led the study. "These are stressful, harsh conditions. Does the environment select for superbugs because they have an advantage? The answer appears to be 'no.'"
The study was published today (Jan. 8) in the journal mSystems. Hartmann is an assistant professor of environmental engineering in Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering.
As the conversation about sending travelers to Mars gets more serious, there has been an increasing interest in understanding how microbes behave in enclosed environments.
"People will be in little capsules where they cannot open windows, go outside or circulate the air for long periods of time," said Hartmann. "We're genuinely concerned about how this could affect microbes."
The ISS houses thousands of different microbes, which have traveled into space either on astronauts or in cargo. The National Center for Biotechnology Information maintains a publicly available database, containing the genomic analyses of many of bacteria isolated from the ISS. Hartmann's team used that data to compare the strains of Staphylococcus aureus and Bacillus cereus on the ISS to those on Earth.
Found on human skin, S. aureus contains the tough-to-treat MRSA strain. B. cereus lives in soil and has fewer implications for human health.
"Bacteria that live on skin are very happy there," Hartmann said. "Your skin is warm and has certain oils and organic chemicals that bacteria really like. When you shed those bacteria, they find themselves living in a very different environment. A building's surface is cold and barren, which is extremely stressful for certain bacteria."
To adapt to living on surfaces, the bacteria containing advantageous genes are selected for or they mutate. For those living on the ISS, these genes potentially helped the bacteria respond to stress, so they could eat, grow and function in a harsh environment.
"Based on genomic analysis, it looks like bacteria are adapting to live -- not evolving to cause disease," said Ryan Blaustein, a postdoctoral fellow in Hartmann's laboratory and the study's first author. "We didn't see anything special about antibiotic resistance or virulence in the space station's bacteria."
Although this is good news for astronauts and potential space tourists, Hartmann and Blaustein are careful to point out that unhealthy people can still spread illness on space stations and space shuttles.
"Everywhere you go, you bring your microbes with you," Hartmann said. "Astronauts are exceedingly healthy people. But as we talk about expanding space flight to tourists who do not necessarily meet astronaut criteria, we don't know what will happen. We can't say that if you put someone with an infection into a closed bubble in space that it won't transfer to other people. It's like when someone coughs on an airplane, and everyone gets sick."
Journal Reference:
- Ryan A. Blaustein, Alexander G. McFarland, Sarah Ben Maamar, Alberto Lopez, Sarah Castro-Wallace, Erica M. Hartmann. Pangenomic Approach To Understanding Microbial Adaptations within a Model Built Environment, the International Space Station, Relative to Human Hosts and Soil. mSystems, 2019; 4 (1) DOI: 10.1128/mSystems.00281-18
In the pre biological are self-organising and self sustaining patterns of organised or structured energy.
I suggest that the term alien simply means 'other'.
The subjective mind is also the mind that subjects its receptive to filters of interpretation, self and other being the idea or image of self - set against everything other, which in some sense then is categories into levels of closer or further from self.
Your body can seem alien - just look at it as a thing. People you think you know can seem alien as well as people you don't and other kinds of being.
The familiar can be simply what we think we know that tells us who we are.
But does such familiarity breed contempt of a taken-for-granted-ness or unfold an ongoing recognition of the more of what Life is and what we are ?
What is a true home?
Giving something true of yourself to your relationships.
The meaning of life is to share the meaning we give it.
A truly shared meaning is given and received as one.
I lean to presuming the germ theory is backwards in assigning the role of pathogen to a process brought about by the terrain. It isn't that there isn't a danger in getting a dirty wound infected - or sickness resulting from toxic exposures or shocks and malnutrition, but that the terrain or biological and psychic-emotional environment is that which is expressing itself.
No need to try to survive.
But there is a call to live in alignment with the true of you instead of trying to be someone - else - because you do not have to try to be what you already are. But there may be a need for discipline of persistent focus in releasing the habits of trying to survive in mask or presentation to self and others - especially if you belief that no one - including yourself - is worth that degree of commitment.
Does anything without the imagination and fear of its own death 'try' to survive?
Or is that our psychic projective imagination?
Are we 'trying' to maintain the psychic-emotional sense of self even at the expense of our body?
A self-consciousness of our life that becomes also a fear of death as a loss of self or indeed a loss of control?
Yet who can hold onto their life?
The biota or life serve life because they are of and within a whole, but a self-consciousness can get in its own way and mistake the dissonance for an alien will that must then be denied or suppressed. The more we try to push down the more it pushes back and the more we kill it the more it sprout up. Disorder as a result of trying to control what would come to natural balance given the right conditions.
If I do not embody my living environment (of true source nature) then I am choosing to release the body's life to a process of dissolution, in rising toxemia of inflammation and self-deprivation instead of embracing the Earth that must of Called me - and I must have answered, or I wouldn't be here.