The species of bacterial and fungal species that live among us is ever-increasing – and this is different in low-gravity environments, such as the International Space Station (ISS).
Researchers from the United States and India working with NASA have now found four strains of bacteria that live in different parts of the ISS – three of which have not, until now, been completely unknown to science.
Three of the four rows were separated back in 2015 and 2016 – one was found on a panel above ISS search stations, the second was found in the Cupola, the third was found on the surface of the board -food; a fourth was found in an old HEPA filter that was returned to Earth in 2011.
The four rays belong to the family of bacteria found in soil and freshwater; they are involved in nitrogen fixation, plant growth, and can inhibit plant pathogens. Basically, good bacteria to be around if you grow things.
You may be wondering what such ground bacteria were doing all the way up on the ISS, but the astronauts living on the space station have been growing some food for years, so it is not surprising that we have found plant-related microbes on board.
One of the rays – the HEPA-filter detector – has been identified as a known species Methylorubrum rhodesianum. The other three were ordered and all were found to belong to the same, previously unknown species, and the sequences were identified as IF7SW-B2T, IIF1SW-B5, and IIF4SW-B5.
The team, led by University of Southern California geneticist Swati Bijlani, has proposed calling the new species Methylobacterium ajmalii after Ajmal Khan, a famous Indian biodiversity scientist. This new discovery is also closely related to a species already known M. indicum.
“To grow plants in real places where there are few resources, isolation of novel microbes that help stimulate plant growth under stressful conditions is essential,” explained two of the team, Kasthuri Venkateswaran and Nitin Kumar Singh of NASA’s JPL. in a press release.
Considering that we already know that these microbes can survive in the harsh conditions of the ISS, the team put the four layers through genetic analysis to look for genes that could be used to help stimulate plant growth.
“The assembly will allow a complete genome sequence of the three ISS sequences reported here with the comparative genomic identification of ISS isolates with Earth’s peers in future studies,” the team writes in the their study.
“This will help identify genetic determinants that may be responsible for stimulating plant growth under microgravity conditions and contribute to the development of self-sustaining plant crops for long-term space missions in the near future. coming. “
The researchers found that one of the ISS rays – IF7SW-B2T – involved in plant growth had promising genes, upregulating a gene for an enzyme essential for cytokinin, which stimulates cell division in roots and shoes.
There is much more research to be done here – the researchers admit that they barely scratched the surface of microbial diversity on the space station. About 1,000 samples have already been collected on the ISS, but are still awaiting a return trip to Earth.
Just think of the fascinating space microbes we have yet to discover!
The research was published in Boundaries in microbiology.