Ryugu Asteroid Sample Rapidly Colonized By Terrestrial Life (phys.org) 36
Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from Phys.org: Researchers from Imperial College London have discovered that a space-returned sample from asteroid Ryugu was rapidly colonized by terrestrial microorganisms, even under stringent contamination control measures. In the study, [...] researchers analyzed sample A0180, a tiny (1 x 0.8 mm) particle collected by the JAXA Hayabusa 2 mission from asteroid Ryugu.
Transported to Earth in a hermetically sealed chamber, the sample was opened in nitrogen in a class 10,000 clean room to prevent contamination. Individual particles were picked with sterilized tools and stored under nitrogen in airtight containers. Before analysis, the sample underwent Nano-X-ray computed tomography and was embedded in an epoxy resin block for scanning electron microscopy. Rods and filaments of organic matter, interpreted as filamentous microorganisms, were observed on the sample's surface. Variations in size and morphology of these structures resembled known terrestrial microbes. Observations showed that the abundance of these filaments changed over time, suggesting the growth and decline of a prokaryote population with a generation time of 5.2 days.
Population statistics indicate that the microorganisms originated from terrestrial contamination during the sample preparation stage rather than being indigenous to the asteroid. Results of the study determined that terrestrial biota had rapidly colonized the extraterrestrial material, even under strict contamination control. Researchers recommend enhanced contamination control procedures for future sample-return missions to prevent microbial colonization and ensure the integrity of extraterrestrial samples. Another factor in gathering contamination-free sampling is that everything used to collect extraterrestrial material originates on a planet awash in microbial life.
Transported to Earth in a hermetically sealed chamber, the sample was opened in nitrogen in a class 10,000 clean room to prevent contamination. Individual particles were picked with sterilized tools and stored under nitrogen in airtight containers. Before analysis, the sample underwent Nano-X-ray computed tomography and was embedded in an epoxy resin block for scanning electron microscopy. Rods and filaments of organic matter, interpreted as filamentous microorganisms, were observed on the sample's surface. Variations in size and morphology of these structures resembled known terrestrial microbes. Observations showed that the abundance of these filaments changed over time, suggesting the growth and decline of a prokaryote population with a generation time of 5.2 days.
Population statistics indicate that the microorganisms originated from terrestrial contamination during the sample preparation stage rather than being indigenous to the asteroid. Results of the study determined that terrestrial biota had rapidly colonized the extraterrestrial material, even under strict contamination control. Researchers recommend enhanced contamination control procedures for future sample-return missions to prevent microbial colonization and ensure the integrity of extraterrestrial samples. Another factor in gathering contamination-free sampling is that everything used to collect extraterrestrial material originates on a planet awash in microbial life.
If microbes made it to the sample does that mean.. (Score:3, Funny)
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Not unlikely any microbe that would naturally evolve from outside of this solar system would exhibit such a degree of compatibility with anything alive on this planet... but otherwise.. I guess it would theoretically be possible. However, there are labs in this world working with highly infective and devastatingly ill-making earth-borne microbes. And as long as all protocols are followed correctly, they seem to hold up, until now.... at least, we're still here, aren't we?
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I agree. Any microbes that exist on the asteroid are going to be evolved to survive the asteroid environment. IE lack of atmosphere, radiation, the materials present, etc...
Odds are they'd be poisoned by free oxygen, not have any metabolic paths for carbon, etc... The very environment of earth would be hostile to them.
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So, no cause for concern then. Phew :-)
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Lab leaks occur, but the effect is quite different from what you suggest. The lab leak theory was always sensationalist at best. But as we have ample evidence of different virus breaking interspecies barriers naturally, there is no need to introduce an artificial component into the equation just to blame it onto someone. That was the only reason the lab leak theory was held upright.
I live just a few miles from a level 4 virology lab [wikipedia.org]. Does not bother me at all. Would not mind a nuclear reactor either but I guess I'll take what I can get.
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The indicated section could have done with more emphasis. A lot more emphasis.
This is asteroidal material, so unless you're going to postulate an origin of life in the vacuum of space (very challenging), then you're going to have to postulate :
Dr. Ian Malcolm said it (Score:5, Funny)
Life...uh...finds a way
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Space? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Space? (Score:4, Interesting)
It also brings into question efforts to decontaminate our probes. It's possible we have already contaminated other worlds with Earth microbes.
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Whether microbes that could survive in the humid sub-tropics of a Florida rocket assembly "clean room", the very humid tropics of a Guyana "clean room", the temperate and moderately humid environs of a Moscow "clean room" (...) would be ones that are likely to be equipped to survive rapid dehydration and decompression, plus extended increased radiation ...
Actually, deliberately "flooding" the clean room(s) (at the microbial population scale
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We might have to study these kind of mission in space as it would be easier/possible to keep the contamination at bay
It seems to me like it would be a ton harder. You would still need the class 10,000 clean room, it's not like you could just open it up on the ISS. So you would have to launch the whole clean room to space along with everything else to make it a space station like power, cooling, docking, life support, etc. All this stuff would need to be sterilized because it was made on Earth, which has microbes EVERYWHERE. You then need to integrate these structures into a rocket and launch them through the dirty atm
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Would you need a class 10,000 clean room if you simply did it directly in the hard vacuum of space? perhaps inside of a basic enclosure to block radiation etc, but essentially rely on 'space' to keep things clean.
Also, surely the microbes need 'food/fuel'; in the vacuum of space, there's not going to be much oxygen, or anything else too subsist on, even if the microbes are 'present' perhaps they'd be unable to actively colonize or multiply, etc?
Doing anything in space is 10x harder and 1000x more expensive
Except perhaps creating a vacuum that isn't crawling with life.
Re:Space? (Score:4, Interesting)
For most of the diversity of terrestrial biology ("diversity", not "abundance") oxygen is a poison, not a "food". It might be a "foodstuff" to you, but apply ten times as much of it and you too would find that it's as poisonous to you. Even "diving doctors" are very cautious about going above 8 times surface oxygen levels when they've got a victim in the (de-)compression chamber with all the facilities of a regional hospital on the same site.
We geologists see a couple of billion years of "banded iron formations" in the PreCambrian era which are the traces of the "Great Oxidation Event" following the development of oxygenic (oxygen-producing) photosynthesis. The other half-dozen different non-oxygenic photosynthesis systems are much rarer because of the poisoning effect of oxygen on almost all biochemical pathways it touches.
Just looking at the diversity of life on Earth, if your putative "alien" organism was sampled randomly from that then the odds are fairly strongly that it would find oxygen to be a poison, not a useful food/ fuel.
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there's not going to be much oxygen, or anything else too subsist on
Thanks for the interesting response about the diversity of terrestrial life, but oxygen was really just an example.
There's not going to be much carbon, sulphur, iron, hydrogen, phosphorus, lithium, or anything else either in the (near) vacuum of space.
It doesn't really matter what the organism needs to reproduce, its not going to be present. It should also be fairly straightforward to limit heat and light too to further starve it.
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But massively the most likely outcome o
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Why are you including humans, or any of their life-support equipment, in the system design?
There is no shortage of established robotic designs for manipulating biological samples for various analyses. Re-designing those to replace all the exposed metal surfaces with monel metal, and all the plastics with suitable fluorine-safe plastics, followed by bathing the
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Class 10000 clean room is clean, but not all that clean - I'm surprised they used it for something that absolutely requires pristine conditions. Fresh air in a forest is 10k-100k particles naturally.
Class 10000 means it allows TEN THOUSAND particles per cubic foot, or about 1 per 3 cubic cm.
Class 1 clean rooms are actually fairly COMMONLY used in semiconductor manufacture, Japan certainly would have had ample access to such.
A quick Google search says there are 10 high class cleanrooms in JP, of which 4 mee
Earth Life.. (Score:3)
is(are) clearly an invasive lifeform(s).
Re: Earth Life.. (Score:2)
Damn right. All those lifeless rocks out there best watch themselves.
Spores (Score:2)
It does seem like a nitrogen atmosphere in a clean room and sterilized utensils would be an adequate defense against contamination but bacterial spores are "extremely stable and can survive for very long time to the absence of water and nutrients, to the presence of lytic enzymes, toxic chemicals, UV irradiation and to extremes of temperature and pH".
https://www.sciencedirect.com/... [sciencedirect.com]
I'm curious to know what "enhanced contamination control procedures" they would use in the future. Presumably they would want
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The space probe that collected the sample wasn't so carefully cleansed. So the sample may have been contaminated in space, from the probe and the little buggers woke up once they got to the comfy lab back on earth. The final sentence of TFS says this indirectly.
It sounds like a hard engineering problem. I'd love to work on that.
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Kind-of makes "wet" chemistry (e.g. digesting the sample with enzymes that would release any nucleic acids as molecules and ions which standard techniques, equipment and data processing can manage.
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I'm expecting that they would want to see any potential evidence of extraterrestrial life or precursors intact on those samples before they hit them with enzymes.
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Contamination with strict controls, you say? (Score:2)
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It's very, very hard to prevent microbe contamination on Earth. Heck, even the ISS is contaminated. Microbes are very good at getting everywhere.
Class 10,000 is not clean (Score:1)
10,000 particles 0.5 micron or larger per cubic foot (sorry for the imbecile units, but that's how cleanrooms are classified) is pretty fucking filthy. I am pretty sure my cat's litter box is cleaner than that.
Or maybe (Score:2)