This content is not included in
your SAE MOBILUS subscription, or you are not logged in.
Passive Experimental Microbial Systems: A Research Platform for the Analysis of Microbial Community Assembly in Spaceflight Ecosystems
Technical Paper
2003-01-2510
ISSN: 0148-7191, e-ISSN: 2688-3627
Annotation ability available
Sector:
Language:
English
Abstract
Extension of human habitation into space requires that humans carry with them many of the microorganisms with which they coexist on Earth. Whether microbes are present by design as constructed communities in bioregenerative life support systems or by accident as hitchhikers attached to human, plant, and spacecraft surfaces, the microbial ecosystems of Earth will be present in space. But how may the space environment affect the interaction of microbial communities? Given the potential for rapid change in populations of microorganisms through mutation, recombination, and natural selection (processes accelerated under space conditions of variable microgravity and elevated background radiation), it will be necessary to understand both the pattern and process of community assembly and evolution in the space environment. On Earth, the abundance of individuals in microbial populations is so large that dispersal is unlikely to ever be limited by geographical barriers (i.e., “everything is everywhere”). This will not be true for microbial communities in space where local species richness will be relatively low because of sterilization protocols prior to launch and the barriers between Earth and spacecraft after launch. Although seeding bioreactors with a diverse community may be sufficient to sustain process performance at the onset, species richness may decline over time such that biological systems lose either functionality (e.g., bioreactors fail to reduce organic carbon or nitrogen load) or stability (i.e., low diversity communities may be more susceptible to environmental perturbation or invasion by human-associated microorganisms). In order to evaluate bioregenerative systems for long duration human exploration, we must first identify biological questions of concern in the assembly and function of microbial communities in closed ecosystems in space. Toward this end, we describe modular units with low mass, energy, and crew-time requirements for microbial cultivation over multiple life cycles in passive experimental microbial systems, or PEMS, that enable the exploration of microbial community ecology and evolution in space.
Authors
Citation
Roberts, M. and Garland, J., "Passive Experimental Microbial Systems: A Research Platform for the Analysis of Microbial Community Assembly in Spaceflight Ecosystems," SAE Technical Paper 2003-01-2510, 2003, https://doi.org/10.4271/2003-01-2510.Also In
References
- Boulos L.M. Prevost M. Barbeau B. Coallier J. Desjardins R. 1999 LIVE/DEAD BacLight: application of a new rapid staining method for direct enumeration of viable and total bacteria in drinking water J. of Microb. Methods 37 77 86
- Cohan F.M. 1994a The effects of rare but promiscuous genetic exchange on evolutionary divergence in prokaryotes American Naturalist 143 965 986
- Cohan F.M. 1994b Genetic exchange and evolutionary divergence in prokaryotes Trends in Ecology & Evolution 9 175 180
- Cohan F.M. 1996 The role of genetic exchange in bacterial evolution American Society for Microbiology News 62 631 636
- Cohan F.M. 1999 Genetic structure of bacterial populations Evolutionary Genetics from Molecules to Morphology Singh R. Krimbas C. 475 489 Cambridge University Press
- Cohan F.M. 2002 What are bacterial species? Annual Review of Microbiology 56 457 487
- Cook K.L. Garrett V. Layton A.C. Dionisi H.M. Sayler G.S. Garland J.L. 2003 Development and molecular characterization of microbial inocula for initiation of graywater waste processing systems on long-term space flights Proceedings of the 33rd Intl. Conf. on Enviro. Syst., ICES2003 SAE, 2003-01-2512
- Garland J.L. Cook K. L. Adams J.L. Kerkhof L. 2001 Culturability as an indicator of succession in microbial communities Microbial Ecology 42 150 158
- Horneck G. 1999 Impact of microgravity on radiobiological processes and efficiency of DNA repair Mutation Research 430 221 228
- Mills A.L. Herman J. S. Hornberger G. M. Ford R. M. 2003 Functional redundancy promotes functional stability in diverse microbial bioreactor communities Proceedings of the 33rd Intl. Conf. on Enviro. Syst., ICES2003 SAE, 2003-01-2509
- Moxon E. R. Rainey P. B. Nowak M. A. Lenski R. E. 1994 Adaptive evolution of highly mutable loci in pathogenic bacteria Current Biology 4 24 33
- Novikova Natalja D. 2000 Survey of Microbial Contamination On Board Manned Russian Space Vehicles http://industry.esa.int/ATTACHEMENTS/A114/novikova.pdf
- Ochman H. Lawrence J.G. Groisman E.A. 2000 Lateral gene transfer and the nature of bacterial innovation Nature 405 299 304
- Rainey P.B. Travisano M. 1998 Adaptive radiation in a heterogeneous environment Nature 394 69 72
- Rainey P.B. Buckling A. Kassin R. Travisano M. 2000 The emergence and maintenance of diversity: insights from experimental bacterial populations Trends Ecol. Evol. 15 243 247
- Roberts M.S. Garland J.L. Mills A.L. 2003 Microbial Astronauts: Assembling Microbial Communities for Advanced Life Support Systems Microbial Ecology
- Treves D. S. Manning S. Adams J. 1998 Repeated evolution of an acetate cross feeding polymorphism in long-term populations of E. coli Molecular Biology and Evolution 15 789 797
- Vulic M. Dionisio F. Taddei F. Radman M. 1997 Molecular keys to speciation: DNA polymorphism and the control of genetic exchange in enterobacteria Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 94 9763 9767
- Yatagai F. Saito T. Takahashi A. Fujie A. Nagaoka S. Sato M. Ohnishi T. 2000 rps L mutation induction after spaceflight on MIR Mutation Research 453 1 4