Technofender

It seems that space travel makes the germs even more virulent and infectious. During the Space Shuttle Mission STS-115, September 2006, there was included a carefully wrapped culture of Salmonella spp. The bacteria responsible for the infectious dyarrhea caused by the ingestion of poisoned food.

The results were amazing. The mice infected in the lab with the space-traveled germ were three times more likely to get sick and died sooner than the ones infected with the non-spaced-traveled samples.

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.
Professor Cheryl Nickerson, associate professor at the Center for Infectious Diseases and Vaccinology at Arizona State University.

The researchers put some cultures of identical strains of salmonella in special containers for the space flight and kept some cultures at the Lab on earth, keeping them at similar conditions of temperature than the ones in space.

The researchers found that - after the whole travel - 167 genes had changed in "Spacer" Salmonella.

Researchers don’t even have a clue of why. In the words of Nickerson: "We do not know with 100 percent certainty what the mechanism is of space flight that’s inducing the changes".

Space Shuttle - Atlantis Mission launched to space.
It carried the containers with the culture of Salmonella used in the research.
Courtesy of CNN.

It seems nertheless, that the Salmonella reacts to the change in the environment caused by the microgravity. Low gravity causes a slow fluid shear. When Salmonella detects the change in the inner environment, it changes its genes - as part of the well known strategy of natural selection - to survive.

The consequences for the future make the previous research something worth to be studied sakefully. It might output some interesting data to know in advance how to treat the diseases caused by microorganisms.

Via: CNN - Science