Beer microbes live 553 days outside ISS


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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11039206

Professor Charles Cockell from the OU explains how the experiment worked

A small English fishing village has produced an out-of-this-world discovery.

Continue reading the main story

?Start Quote

These are just everyday organisms that live on the coast in Beer in Devon and they can survive in space?

End Quote Dr Karen Olsson-Francis Open University

Bacteria taken from cliffs at Beer on the South Coast have shown themselves to be hardy space travellers.

The bugs were put on the exterior of the space station to see how they would cope in the hostile conditions that exist above the Earth's atmosphere.

And when scientists inspected the microbes a year and a half later, they found many were still alive.

These survivors are now thriving in a laboratory at the Open University (OU) in Milton Keynes.

The experiment is part of a quest to find microbes that could be useful to future astronauts who venture beyond low-Earth orbit to explore the rest of the Solar System.

OU researcher Dr Karen Olsson-Francis told BBC News: "It has been proposed that bacteria could be used in life-support systems to recycle everything.

"There is also the concept that if we were to develop bases on the Moon or Mars, we could use bacteria for 'bio-mining' - using them to extract important minerals from rocks."

This type of research also plays into the popular theory that micro-organisms can somehow be transported between the planets in rocks - in meteorites - to seed life where it does not yet exist.

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So... what the hell were they "breathing" in space??

Many micro-organisms are able to shut down their metabolism for extended periods of time. In these "dormant" phases, they either carry out biological functions at a dramatically slowed rate, or cease altogether, so it is entirely possible that they didn't need to "breathe" at all, but they weren't doing much else either. No eating, no movement, no growth, etc.

This isn't entirely surprising. Many "normal" organisms demonstrate an ability to survive hostile conditions. We typically store our mammalian cell lines under liquid nitrogen. Our prokaryotic strains such as E. coli are stored long-term at -80 C. Lichen has traveled into space and survived the trip, and small organisms don't have huge difficulties with variations in pressure. Just imagine what kind of pressure a virus protein coat must endure to hold its DNA payload.

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andromeda strain ?

great movie, the original not the remake

Either way it goes to show how little we know about "life" and that it can still surprise us.

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great movie, the original not the remake

Either way it goes to show how little we know about "life" and that it can still surprise us.

Never seen the movie. great book though. i wish there were more details on this. particularly on conditions in which the bacteria were kept, if the bacteria were exposed to cosmic radiation, amount of nutrients supplied, were there any symbiotic bacteria etc

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Many micro-organisms are able to shut down their metabolism for extended periods of time. In these "dormant" phases, they either carry out biological functions at a dramatically slowed rate, or cease altogether, so it is entirely possible that they didn't need to "breathe" at all, but they weren't doing much else either. No eating, no movement, no growth, etc.

This isn't entirely surprising. Many "normal" organisms demonstrate an ability to survive hostile conditions. We typically store our mammalian cell lines under liquid nitrogen. Our prokaryotic strains such as E. coli are stored long-term at -80 C. Lichen has traveled into space and survived the trip, and small organisms don't have huge difficulties with variations in pressure. Just imagine what kind of pressure a virus protein coat must endure to hold its DNA payload.

Yea, but that wasn't my quesion.

Plants breathe in carbon dioxide, for example.

SO, my question is... did the bacteria "shut down", or was it actually able

to sustain itself up there. And if so, it leads to the question of what was

it "breathing" in space that it also has access to here on Earth.

Or am I missing something here?

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Yea, but that wasn't my quesion.

Plants breathe in carbon dioxide, for example.

SO, my question is... did the bacteria "shut down", or was it actually able

to sustain itself up there. And if so, it leads to the question of what was

it "breathing" in space that it also has access to here on Earth.

Or am I missing something here?

After a year and a half in space? They went dormant. You can't have metabolism when the entirety of your cellular machinery is encased in solid ice.

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After a year and a half in space? They went dormant. You can't have metabolism when the entirety of your cellular machinery is encased in solid ice.

Um....

From the article:

They would have been exposed to extreme ultraviolet light, cosmic rays, and dramatic shifts in temperature.

All the water in the limestone would also have boiled away into the vacuum of space.

Where does it say encased in ice? It mentions the water evaporating and dramatic shifts in temperature...

so hot AND cold.

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what was it "breathing" in space that it also has access to here on Earth.

Or am I missing something here?

As stated before. They weren't breathing. Example of what they would have done.

Yes. I know thats not space and Yes. I know they are cockroaches. But same survival method.

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Um....

From the article:

Where does it say encased in ice? It mentions the water evaporating and dramatic shifts in temperature...

so hot AND cold.

Cells have water on the inside that freezes.

Also, "dramatic shifts in temperature" does NOT mean hot and cold as you'd normally think of it. If I took you out of space and plunged you into liquid nitrogen, you would experience a dramatic shift in temperature, but I'll bet you wouldn't describe any of it as hot.

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Yes, but it doesn't say A shift in temp, it uses the plural. So cold, not so cold? Instead

of heat?

Regardless, am I missing something FROM THE ARTICLE?

Assumptions are being made... I'm reading the article itself which

I can't find as saying the organism "shut down" or went comotose.

Thus, my original question.

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Yes, but it doesn't say A shift in temp, it uses the plural. So cold, not so cold? Instead

of heat?

Regardless, am I missing something FROM THE ARTICLE?

Assumptions are being made... I'm reading the article itself which

I can't find as saying the organism "shut down" or went comotose.

Thus, my original question.

If we're not allowed to answer your question with information that is not present in the article, then it will remain unanswered. :rolleyes:

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If we're not allowed to answer your question with information that is not present in the article, then it will remain unanswered. rolleyes.gif

hehe.

Obviously, I'm not a scientist. Therefore, I go by what is presented to me.

The article, itself, gives the impression that the organism was able to sustain

itself in space for a long time. I can hold my breathe underwater for quite a

while, but that doesn't mean I can live down there. The article doesn't give

an example like that, though. It makes it seem like the organism could have

continued to survive.

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