Space station mold survives high doses of ionizing radiation
The International Space Station, like all human habitats in space, has a nagging mold problem. Astronauts on the ISS spend hours every week cleaning the inside of the station's walls to prevent mold from becoming a health problem.
New research being presented here finds mold spores may also survive on the outside walls of spacecraft.
Spores of the two most common types of mold on the ISS, Aspergillus and Pennicillium, survive X-ray exposure at 200 times the dose that would kill a human, according to Marta Cortesão, a microbiologist at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Cologne, who will present the new research Friday at the 2019 Astrobiology Science Conference (AbSciCon 2019).
Pennicillium and Aspergillus species are not usually harmful, but inhaling their spores in large amounts can sicken people with weakened immune systems. Mold spores can withstand extreme temperatures, ultraviolet light, chemicals and dry conditions. This resiliency makes them hard to kill.
"We now know that [fungal spores] resist radiation much more than we thought they would, to the point where we need to take them into consideration when we are cleaning spacecraft, inside and outside," Cortesao said. "If we're planning a long duration mission, we can plan on having these mold spores with us because probably they will survive the space travel."
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Hartree on Friday June 28 2019, @06:21PM (5 children)
If travel through space on open surfaces won't kill mold spores and the like, this makes the Fermi Paradox even worse. Some subset of any alien microbes would probably be just as tough.
Not only do we need to consider not having seen evidence of intelligent life that has gotten into space, we have to wonder why any tough microscopic life forms they would have carried with them haven't shown up. That they don't have to be buried inside a meteoroid for shielding against radiation opens things up more.
It's another indication that it's a low probability event that there are races that can accidently loft microbes into space, so we haven't seen them. Or that the conditions for such civilizations to arise are new enough that any microbes they got into space haven't been able to make the multiple hops that it would likely take to cover the interstellar distances given 14 odd billion years of the universe existing.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday June 28 2019, @07:13PM (1 child)
Makes it virtually certain that Earthly microbes have made it to Mars. And vice-versa. Probably happened billions of years before the Viking landers. Nevertheless, might be a good idea to route future missions to Mars so that they pass close to the sun.
There's a strange perceptual dualism about life. When we fear ecological collapse, supervolcano eruptions, asteroid impacts, and other calamities, then life is very very fragile. When we fear diseases and invasive species, then life is really tough. "Life find a way."
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday June 28 2019, @07:37PM
And a trailer [youtu.be], too.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Immerman on Friday June 28 2019, @07:36PM (2 children)
Not really - surviving radiation while fully alive is one thing: if cellular repair processes are robust enough they can fix the DNA damage as it happens.
When an organism puts itself in stasis though, those repairs get suspended. Whether we're talking mold or bacterial pores, plant seeds, or dormant tardigrades, the radiation damage keeps accumulating while the repair processes are suspended. Stay in space for a few days or months and the damage can maybe be repaired when the organism reanimates. Give it years in space though, and it'll need *very* robust repair mechanisms (tardigrades might still pull it off...). Give it millions of years though, which is probably an optimistic timeframe for impact ejecta to migrate between stars, and the DNA (along with everything else) will be so thoroughly destroyed that you approach 100% certainty that the organism will be dead, though perhaps some DNA or RNA fragments might still be viable enough to jumpstart prebiotic chemistry (if it really needs any help.)
I believe most panspermia speculation operates on the assumption that the organisms are preserved deep within large ejected rocks - they pretty much would have to be to survive the high-temperature violence of ejection and reentry in the first place, and it leaves them well-shielded against radiation as well.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 29 2019, @07:19AM (1 child)
but how much danger is there really in interstelar space?
my understanding is that the problems comes from the sun, which emits high intensity streams of various things.
more energetic stuff can come from outside the solar system, but is the intensity high enough to cause problems?
to rephrase: is there any ionizing radiation danger if you're in orbit around Pluto?
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday June 29 2019, @03:57PM
Roughly half of all radiation in Earth's orbit comes from insterstellar space. Including the most damaging, incredibly high-energy radiation, cosmic rays, which originate in cataclysmic events like supernovae and far more violent events thus far only speculated about.
Leave the Sun's sphere of influence, and you eliminate that half of the radiation, but the rest actually increases, as the ionized particles of the solar wind are no longer partially shielding you from interstellar radiation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 28 2019, @07:54PM (2 children)
Wouldn't mold's toughness make it useful in terraforming Mars? I'm just wondering if seeding Mars with mold and other terrestrial forms of life that might survive there, could help in the process of making Mars more suitable for human life there.
Yeah, yeah, that would destroy the pristine native Mars environment. That's what life does. If humans are at any point going to get out of the solar system, we're going to have to spread to the other planets first. Sure, study Mars as it is for a while, even a long while, but then seize it for our own.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday June 28 2019, @08:06PM
Molds aren't photosynthetic, so they need a host to live on. Lichens might work, though.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday June 28 2019, @08:15PM
Probably the best ways to terraform include producing and blasting as much sulfur hexafluoride into the atmosphere as possible, and maybe using solar concentrating satellites to help heat up the surface (as opposed to mirrors blocking sunlight from reaching Venus).
Alternatively, we could create a sealed environment encapsulating a lot of soil, and then introduce molds, etc. for bio-remediation. Rather than a giant transparent dome, I'm thinking of a long, wide, flat [electrek.co] concrete structure dotted with layers of windows on the ceiling to let some sunlight in. Or no windows at all, just thick concrete, and just LEDs (power from nuclear/fusion with some solar panels on top). Make it tall enough to grow some trees indoors.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Friday June 28 2019, @08:00PM (6 children)
I wonder, are these still the same molds that are present on Earth, or have they evolved to better survive the vacuum and radiation?
It does suggest an excellent project we could be working on now to prepare for colonizing space - start breeding a robust and nutritious (and noninfectious) "primordial slime" of algae, molds, and other single-celled organisms that are exposed to steadily increasing radiation level. Perhaps a long "petri dish" where one end is well shielded, and the other not at all, giving lots of room for those with more effective radiation resistance mutations to expand. Sort of a radiation analog to the large-scale antibiotic resistance demonstration, where bacteria evolved resistance to 1000x the level of antibiotics that would normally kill them in only 11 days: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yybsSqcB7mE [youtube.com]
Microbes have the advantage that they can replicate *very* quickly - inflate a huge new "balloon greenhouse" on Mars or wherever, seed it with a scoop of slime, provide it with water, CO2, and trace elements, and in a relatively few weeks the thing will be filled to capacity with thriving biomass ready to be harvested. It may not make for the most appetizing menu out there, but as a source of oxygen, fertilizer, animal feedstock, and emergency/baseline rations it'd be hard to beat in terms of required infrastructure and delay until your first harvest. No need for radiation shielding and artificial lighting, just a big balloon with a floor durable enough to walk on without puncturing. And if a meteor or other problem punctures the balloon, or a dangerous mutation arises, just sterilize the whole thing, make any needed repairs, and start over. You'll only lose a few weeks of production.
Plus, having a thriving microbial ecosystem that's completely benign to humans would be a *huge* help in keeping more dangerous microbes at bay.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday June 28 2019, @08:09PM (4 children)
Well, we've got enough "nuclear waste" of varying degrees of "hotness". The only thing is, I remember an article about cockroaches eating the insulation within an operating nuclear pile, and they were well within the hot zone. So this may well not be necessary. Also look up "Deinococcus radiodurans".
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday June 28 2019, @08:17PM (3 children)
There are certainly organisms out there that can already survive the conditions, but we don't want just any organisms that can survive. We want a happy, stable "farm" that will thrive with minimal intervention from us. And that won't eat our reactor shielding (or the balloon, plumbing, etc.)
But yes, you make an excellent point that we could do a lot of the work right here on Earth using radioactive material to simulate space radiation - though we can't really simulate cosmic rays without including a powerful particle accelerator as well, and that likely gets expensive.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday June 28 2019, @10:41PM (2 children)
I don't know. Microbes are a pretty small target, and high energy cosmics are quite rare. We probably don't need to consider those. If you're planning an entire ecosystem, though, you'll need at some point to boost it to space to ensure that it handles zero-G properly. At the microbial level that probably means, essentially, no convection currents, though there's some evidence that this scales down all the way to the molecular interaction level.
Also, since you are specifying what it doesn't eat, you also need to decide what it could eat. Since you seem to see this as a "wild ecosystem", that would need to be something that it will find at it's intended destination, which would mean that different environments would need different ecosystems to be evolved to suit them. But you'll need to ensure that none of the prohibited food-stuffs are available where they are being evolved. Tricky. It would be easier to add in something that would make them allergic to, say, Iodine. (Fungi already have a strong bias in that direction.) And then just iodize anything we didn't want them to touch.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday June 29 2019, @04:34PM
A fair point - the beauty of microbes is they reproduce like mad, so we don't actually have to worry about survival of individuals at all, only the population. Which means anything that doesn't affect at least a large minority of the population every few hours (every generation) is really just background noise. It's only the continuous background of lower-energy radiation that matters to microbe populations.
I don't see that zero-G endurance is as big of an issue. It would certainly be nice to have, but there's lots of planets and moons we could colonize first, as well as centripetal habitats in space. Anywhere humans live long-term we're going to want some kind of "gravity", because *we* don't handle zero-g well. And that's unlikely to change any time soon. If our supporting ecosystem needs it too - well, that's a lot more structure that has to rotate in freefall, but that might actually be the easier engineering solution anyway.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday June 29 2019, @05:21PM
Oh, and yes, for terraforming it would have to eat something present at the destination, but for colonizing it could just be something *made* there - the chemical equivalent of dead slime, or something close enough. A stable ecosystem feeds on itself for raw materials. It needs an energy source like sunlight, but it only needs additional raw materials in order to grow. A non-growing outpost wouldn't need any local materials at all to sustain itself, though it would probably save a bundle on shipping costs during the initial construction.
And someplace like Mars already has the primary bulk ingredients present in vast, readily accessible quantities: CO2 and water. It may need some compressing, heating, and filtering, but that's the vast majority, by mass, of what biomass is made of - corn is around 86% carbon and oxygen, with another 6% hydrogen, for a total of 92% (https://naldc.nal.usda.gov/download/IND43966853/PDF). Humans are about 93% those three, though in different ratios (we're much more oxygen, and a a bit more hydrogen - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composition_of_the_human_body) [wikipedia.org]
Trace elements will need to be mined and refined, or even imported in as fertilizers and dietary supplements, if we can't find a source of something that simpler processing wlll make "palatable" to the biomass. And a microbial ecosystem makes testing easier - when generations are measured in hours you can test the long-term effects of new additives on the population in days instead of years.
I would say I envision it as "wild" only in the sense that it doesn't need a lot of outside intervention to thrive within it's bubble. And it must be "friendly" enough for us to live in another part of the same bubble without being eaten alive or inflicted with other severe ailments, biological or technological.
Basically the same scenario we have here - a thriving microbial ecosystem providing the foundation for all the complex life that's built upon it. Wipe out all the microbes and everything dies. Wipe out all nonhuman multicellular life on the planet, and the microbial world would be dealt a harsh blow, but much of it would survive and flourish, and some portion of humanity could still support themselves upon it.
I'm just talking about doing the reverse - work on building a microbial foundation that can survive in absolute minimalist space habitats without any radiation shielding - that's enough to get us started cheaply and easily. Because our farms will need to be much larger than our habitats, and thin inflatable balloons, domes, etc. are far cheaper to build and move than anything that can provide radiation shielding, as well as a replacement for the solar energy that can't get through that shielding.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Friday June 28 2019, @08:11PM
There's another big benefit for such a project beyond the radiation-resistant microbial ecosystem itself: gene sequence the originals and the final robust space-farers, and you've got a huge library of different mutations that increase radiation resistance, at least some of which could almost certainly be inserted into more traditional multicellular plant and animal farm stock to make it better suited to life in space, and eventually even into human colonists themselves.
(Score: 2) by black6host on Friday June 28 2019, @08:32PM (2 children)
And radiation? Some tough bastards. Guess I don't have a chance against that crap in my shower :)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by EvilSS on Friday June 28 2019, @08:50PM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Saturday June 29 2019, @01:29AM
Who needs grey goo, when brown/green slime will beat us to it!
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by Rupert Pupnick on Friday June 28 2019, @09:10PM (2 children)
In order to grow, it must be feeding on the waste products of other living things, right? What else is in the ISS ecosystem besides humans for it to feed on?
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday June 28 2019, @09:14PM (1 child)
I say we collect the mold, eliminate human waste products from their environment, watch them continue to grow, get all freaked out, and then turn it into a new sequel in the Aliens series.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Saturday June 29 2019, @01:42AM
While "it's in the walls!" can be terrifying, the 10 to 15 day growth rate [moldbacteriaconsulting.com] means the chase scenes with need careful editing..
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by looorg on Friday June 28 2019, @10:24PM
I for one welcome out new radiation-resistant-space-mold-devouring-hivemind-overlord. Dare we hope it is 'the Blob' ...
(Score: 1) by LAV8.ORg on Sunday June 30 2019, @03:15AM (1 child)
There's little to no chance that we, Earth originating megafauna, become an extensively successful spacefaring species without taking biomes with us. The sterile tin cans that are our spacecraft are the music of banging rocks together relative to the orchestra+choir of an ecosystem with networks of mutual benefit so broad that they exceed the bounds of cellular life, to include geology, hydrology, and the patterns of history. To put it another way, we will be securely on the path of colonizing space when our craft automatically recovers and redistributes the remains of dead organisms, as Earth does when nature is allowed to take its course.
The idea that a human is fully extractable from its environment and capable of operating normally in such an isolated state is naive; if you didn't know, every single one of your cells contains a foreign organism that has its own DNA, which is to say something definitively not human. and there is no living without them. (Mitochondria play a critical role in cellular metabolism, all animal life depends on this ancient symbiotic relationship). Excluding those, approximately half of the cells in our bodies are non-human microorganisms that are typically somewhere between beneficial and necessary for optimum function (admittedly this is a contest favoring minimal volume, essentially pitting red blood cells against intestinal microbiota, but the point stands).
I submit that the persistent and dramatically erroneous notion that humanity has reached such a mastery of nature that we are not only superior to it but have achieved independence from it, is the paragon of the perilous egotism that has colored the past century or so, which has advanced to the point of threatening to bring the whole house down. It is my opinion that we are at or near a local optimum with regard to general advancement (tech, social, academic, etc), hamstrung by the pigheaded adherence to the perspective that we are playing human vs. everything, when what we're really playing is Life vs. nothing (which is in other words ordered, cumulatively constructive chemical reactions vs. random reactions trending towards a steady state).
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday June 30 2019, @04:00AM
On the contrary, NASA is thinking about biomes, plants, etc. and is on track to embrace symbiosis. And more broadly, almost all of humanity are still enslaved by the notion of inevitable death, therefore the vast majority do/can not claim to have truly mastered nature and achieved independence from it. If anti-aging research breaches into the public consciousness and starts succeeding in boosting lifespans indefinitely, then we can truly talk about egotism.
ISS isn't a good representation of future spacefaring or even current thinking. It was designed and launched decades ago. There's no artificial gravity, and it needs constant resupply. They grew some lettuce and stuff up there, but had to send it back to Earth so it could be studied. Maybe they are eating some of it now, but it is unsustainable.
Going forward, NASA and other parties will have to balance "planetary protection" with the desire to colonize or just put boots on the ground. Since it's conceivable that Mars, Ceres, Europa, Ganymede, Titan, Pluto, etc. already contain life forms. We'll probably settle on sending humans to look for pristine buried life that couldn't possibly be from recent contamination.
Fast forward to when interstellar colonization efforts may occur. We'll have had over a century to think about how to transport a biome, balance sterility and symbiosis, etc. Instead of tin cans, the spacecraft may look more like Wraith hive ships.
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