Microbes Unknown To Science Discovered On the International Space Station (sciencealert.com) 48
AmiMoJo shares a report from ScienceAlert: The menagerie of bacterial and fungal species living among us is ever growing -- and this is no exception in low-gravity environments, such as the International Space Station (ISS). Researchers from the United States and India working with NASA have now discovered four strains of bacteria living in different places in the ISS -- three of which were, until now, completely unknown to science.
Three of the four strains were isolated back in 2015 and 2016 -- one was found on an overhead panel of the ISS research stations, the second was found in the Cupola, the third was found on the surface of the dining table; the fourth was found in an old HEPA filter returned to Earth in 2011. All four of the strains belong to a family of bacteria found in soil and freshwater; they are involved in nitrogen fixation, plant growth, and can help stop plant pathogens. Basically, good bacteria to have around if you're growing things. The research has been published in Frontiers in Microbiology.
Three of the four strains were isolated back in 2015 and 2016 -- one was found on an overhead panel of the ISS research stations, the second was found in the Cupola, the third was found on the surface of the dining table; the fourth was found in an old HEPA filter returned to Earth in 2011. All four of the strains belong to a family of bacteria found in soil and freshwater; they are involved in nitrogen fixation, plant growth, and can help stop plant pathogens. Basically, good bacteria to have around if you're growing things. The research has been published in Frontiers in Microbiology.
The Strain (Score:1)
..is not known.
I'm not saying it's aliens... (Score:3, Funny)
..,but it's aliens.
It's life (Score:5, Funny)
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It's the Protomolecule (Score:2)
The 4th unknown.. (Score:4, Informative)
''the fourth was found in an old HEPA filter returned to Earth in 2011.''
Apparently they know that one as Methylorubrum rhodesianum. The ones they found in the environment on the station were unidentified.
The question is did they originate from earth and we just didn't notice them yet, or [seeing as how they are aerobes] did we just release bacteria that live in space in our environment [even one we think is protected]?
The question is valid as we do have the ability to do some major fuckery, and are inquisitive enough to do it without considering anything but just proving we can. Hopefully we'll get better at knowing the actual results of our fuckery before harming ourselves or our environment more than we already have.
Re:The 4th unknown.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Occam's Razor says "yes"
It's just a matter of there being an estimated 1E19 species of bacteria, and we only gene sequenced 1E4 of them.
These things don't live in space, they need water and air. Even in experiments where bacteria survived in space, they did so by creating spore capsules, basically stopping their metabolism. We don't know any species that can really live in space, and the biology of such creatures would be almost magic...
The question is valid as we do have the ability to do some major fuckery
No, it really isn't. It's fearmongering based on not understanding science/biology.
Re:The 4th unknown.. (Score:5, Insightful)
...The question is did they originate from earth and we just didn't notice them yet, or [seeing as how they are aerobes] did we just release bacteria that live in space in our environment
The fact that they are aerobic tends to suggest that they are not "bacteria that live in space," since space lacks an atmosphere
Since they were retreived from the inside of the space station, and the inside is protected from the outside (since humans live inside), the answer to the question is, these are terrestrial bacteria that happened to hitch a ride to space. Since bacteria follow humans everywhere we go, that's not unexpected.
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''the inside is protected from the outside (since humans live inside), ''
Somewhat, I assume. We have found known bacteria that can survive in a vacuum. We do exit the station, and the clothing necessary to transverse isn't isolated from from the interior once the pressure is regulated. I made a wrong assumption that an anaerobe could also survive in a vacuum, and that was stupid of me. But we've only recently noticed that some of ''our'' bacteria could survive in a vacuum. Am I wrong to think that there may
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quality response, insightful.
Re: The 4th unknown.. (Score:2)
Nothing impressive here (Score:3, Insightful)
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These "unknown to science" microbes are "unknown to science" only in the way that there isn't something that is 99.9% similar in public databases. Is there something at least 97% similar? Yes! So no, they aren't really novel or "unknown to science". If these were isolated from some "boring" environment the authors would have a hard time of even publishing because there would be nothing novel..
Humans and chimps share 98.8% [amnh.org] of DNA. I think this 1.2% difference is quite significant, don't you?
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This is true. I once heard E.O. Wilson say that if you wanted to find a species unknown to science, go into your back yard and dig up about a cubic meter of Earth, then start looking for nematodes.
When my kids were into scouting, I was for a time the local tree identification geek. I sometimes led trips to the arboretum where I'd teach kids how to tell the difference between a plane tree and a maple tree, or tell a red oak from a white oak. I once got it into my head that it might be interesting to do *sh
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Arguably the concept of "species" is arbitrary
Darwin made much the same argument in his 'On The Origin of Species'. Among pigeon fanciers (of which Darwin was one) there are arguments to this day whether all domesticated pigeons are just subspecies of the wild rock dove or whether tumblers, fantails, etc. qualify as separate species. Some of them even have different numbers of vertebra than the rock dove, many of them won't voluntarily mate with each other, I think there are a couple of varieties that are mutually infertile even if artificially insem
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Sure, in the same way as programming languages are part of computer science. There is no ideal programming language that is fundamentally more right than all others, they're all just conventions used to express computational ideas. Same with Taxonomy; it is both scientific and arbitrary; it meets the arbitrary needs of people studying the objective world.
The platonic plague (Score:1)
The Universe Is Teeming With Life (Score:2)
Life keeps finding ways to show up everywhere we look. Provides support for the theory that the reason we haven't met anybody intelligent yet is because of the remoteness of our solar system and perhaps the galaxy..
Re: The Universe Is Teeming With Life (Score:3)
I am sure even the Ants believe they've never met any life forms more intelligent than them
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This is legitimately one of the most succinct ways to describe a phenomenon I've often thought of as true. Maybe we're surrounded by intelligences we just aren't capable of comprehending. As much as most people would like me to toss a 'yet' on that statement, I don't know how much faith I have in our ability to get there as a species without wiping ourselves out in the process.
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Exactly !
And with us being clueless about almost all the basic things from what causes gravity to how life evolved etc and even failing to understand that after coming up with hypothetical particles / forces that may be affecting things, it looks very similar to what ants might think when they see a sugar cube disappear because we picked it up ! - its dark energy or tachyons or...
Not that I don't love all the hypothetical & obtuse math stuff myself. Just food for thought and why a bit of humility that w
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THE ANTS KNEW ALL ALONG!
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Even though I suspect there is alien intelligence somewhere, contact with them is not related to this at all.
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We've found life at the bottom of some of the deepest bore holes and the tops of the clouds. There are some suspicious indications about Mars and some of the ice moons, but anything living there is going to be so different from whatever we've previously categorized that we'll need to be there to examine it to be sure.
Consequences (Score:4, Insightful)
First, that the process of screening materials sent to the ISS is not as capable as we might have thought.
Second, that we are seeing the ability of locally-originating bacteria to mutate whilst in space.
Obviously, there will be other conclusions from people a lot smarter than me...
On the first point, this might interest us given the time, trouble and expense that NASA invests into ensuring that materials taken to the ISS are as clean and sterile as they can be. [Obviously, it's possible that these previously unknown strains could have made it through the NASA safety net...]. But given what we've learned about the ability for, say, Covid-19 to survive on contact surfaces for up to 72 hours, then if this is the explanation behind the presence of the strains on the ISS, it introduces the possibility that a potentially serious, potentially malignant microbe could be transported to the ISS and for it to infect the crew, perhaps in a way that would warrant a return-to-Earth recovery.
Second, the idea of the bacteria mutating, either more rapidly or more aggressively [towards more human-hostile strains] thanks, perhaps, to the higher levels of cosmic radiation in the ISS than on earth. This isn't a dystopian sci-fi novel scenario: we're not about to see the ISS crew reduced to zombies. But depending on the nature of a mutation and the resources on board being able to cope with crew infection, that might also represent some interesting challenges.
Reality check: humans have been living in space for many years, for extended periods of time. Skylab was occupied in 1973 and 1974 and marked our first attempt at a prolonged stay in micro-gravity. Mir operated in LEO from 1986 to 2001. Now we have the ISS. So the chances of anything unexpected happening is extremely remote. But "eyes open" are better than "eyes closed", at least with risks like these.
Re:Consequences (Score:4, Interesting)
Third a near sterile environment as well as unique environment will allow allow for some species to grow and prosper better than earth.
The near sterile environment may have removed other organisms that eat them all the time, the environment of micro-gravity and perhaps radiation may allow them to grow and reproduce better (often giving a 3D dimension vs a 2D on earths gravity)
Being that we humans and other living things are sent to the ISS, we cannot be 100% sterile, as we need to survive, and need microorganism for our life processes, and for plants as well.
Re:Consequences (Score:5, Insightful)
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I've seen biologists refer to humans as "mobile bacterial colonies".
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Conjecture, not conclusion.
I think I know where this is going (Score:3)
The year was 1968. The movie was science fiction. Well, at least it was science fiction then!!!
Well, there are interesting aspects (Score:3)
So in summary, we've only identified most of the species of bacteria that were brought up to the ISS, and now we've found some of the not-yet-studied-but-still-fairly-ordinary species there. So what might be interesting would be to determine if they got there from a horticultural experiment (i.e. did bacteria from an experiment spread all over the ISS) or did they ride there on a person? Is the distribution of bacteria similar to that found on similar surfaces on Earth? Are the conditions on the ISS (i.e. temperature, temperature profile, humidity, radiation, gravity, etc.) helping or hurting the growth of these species vs on Earth? So while the headline is a bit sensationalistic, there is some real validity to this report.
We discover prev unknown bacteria all the time. (Score:2, Funny)
Documentary (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Microbes? (Score:2)
I have 2 rats of unknown origins in my cellar.