“One of the crucial extra equivalent environments to the ISS used to be within the isolation dorms at the UCSD campus all the way through the COVID-19 pandemic. All surfaces have been regularly sterilized, in order that microbial signatures can be erased by the point someone else would display up,” Benitez stated. So, probably the most first answers to the ISS microbial variety downside he and his colleagues prompt used to be that they in all probability will have to ease up on sterilizing the station such a lot.
“The intensive use of disinfection chemical substances will not be the most efficient way to keeping up a wholesome microbial setting, despite the fact that there may be without a doubt a lot of analysis to be carried out,” Benitez stated.
House-faring gardens
He prompt that introducing microbes which might be really useful to human well being may well be higher than continuously suffering to wipe out all microbial existence at the station. And whilst some modules up there do want to be sterilized, preserving some really useful microbes alive may well be completed via designing long term spacecraft in some way that accounts for a way the microbes unfold.
“We discovered that microbes in modules with little human task have a tendency to stick in the ones modules with out spreading. When human task is prime in a module, then the microbes unfold to adjoining modules,” Zhao stated. She stated spacecraft may well be designed to position modules with prime human task at one finish and the modules with little to no human task on the reverse finish, so the busy modules don’t contaminate those that want to stay sterile. “We’re in fact speaking as microbiologists and chemists—in all probability spacecraft engineers have extra urgent causes to position positive modules at positive spots,” Zhao stated. “Those are simply initial concepts.”
However what about crewed deep house missions to Mars and different locations within the Sun Device? Will have to we moderately design the microbial composition previously, plant the microbes at the spacecraft and hope this synthetic, closed ecosystem will paintings for years with none interventions from Earth?
“I’d take a extra holistic ecosystem means,” Benitez stated. He imagines at some point lets construct spacecraft and house stations webhosting whole gardens with microbes that may engage with vegetation, pollinators, and animals to create balanced, self-sustaining ecosystems. “We’d no longer best want to consider sending the astronauts and the machines they want to serve as, but in addition about all different lifeforms we will be able to want to ship along side them,” Benitez stated
Cellular, 2025. DOI: 10.1016/j.cellular.2025.01.039
