[HN Gopher] Drug resistant bacteria found on ISS mutating to bec...
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Drug resistant bacteria found on ISS mutating to become
functionally distinct
Author : typeofhuman
Score : 228 points
Date : 2024-05-05 23:32 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nasa.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nasa.gov)
| neom wrote:
| Not a biologist so not sure if this is reasonable, but seems it
| might be cool to compare the evolution of them in space and on
| earth and then try to understand what stressors caused what
| adaptations? Maybe it could be an interesting way to understand
| the evolutionary process more. Either way, I suppose we need to
| figure this stuff out if we're going to become multiplanetary.
| Super cool research, here is the paper:
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10960378/pdf/40...
| leoh wrote:
| The bacteria gonna' keep us from Mars
| codetrotter wrote:
| Space flu
| moomoo11 wrote:
| X Covid X
|
| Also its gamer tag
| senectus1 wrote:
| war of the worlds in reverse.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| remember how NASA had quarantines and all that wasteful and
| unnecessary things which Elon musk would never waste time or
| money on?
|
| maybe war of the worlds was a warning about private space
| exploration more than anything else. imagine being invaded by
| aliens with good protocols.
| pests wrote:
| Lets hope it doesn't dim our sun...
| Mhinoverse wrote:
| I created an account just to say how much I love your
| comment. I just finished this book, and it was an incredible
| journey.
| wudangmonk wrote:
| I can't recall this being the premise of any book I've
| read, please let us know the name of the book.
| xvilka wrote:
| Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir.
| vinni2 wrote:
| astrophage
| gr2m wrote:
| Which book is it?
| stetrain wrote:
| Project Hail Mary
| FredPret wrote:
| I'm reading that book right now for the second time. It's
| even better than The Martian. It's kind of in the same spirit
| as Delta-V or Critical Mass by Daniel Suarez. Sci-fi with
| some of the details worked out.
| TheBlight wrote:
| Pretty sure the radiation will be a bigger deal.
| foota wrote:
| Turns out we had the Fermi paradox wrong all this time, it's
| not the all intelligent space faring civilizations we had to
| fear, but space MRSA.
| baq wrote:
| Oh the Boeing paradox.
| kazinator wrote:
| Bacteria preparing for _space_ by making themselves _drug_
| resistant highlights their misplaced priorities.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| Perhaps their mechanism for "drug resistance" also resists
| damage from cosmic rays or similar space adaptation -- and the
| drug resistance is merely a side-effect.
| benterix wrote:
| That makes studying that mechanism even more important.
| beerandt wrote:
| It's in the title, but the abstract doesn't mention anything
| specifically about drug resistance, just adaptation/ mutation
| in general.
|
| Unless I missed it.
|
| I think it might be a (bad journalistic attempt as a) general
| descriptor for the species/ strain of bacteria studied, but
| maybe I'm reading it wrong.
| cseleborg wrote:
| The strain of bacteria was described as "notoriously drug-
| resistant". It didn't sound to me like the bacteria became
| drug-resistant in space.
| Nevermark wrote:
| Of all the strains of bacteria that we might give an
| opportunity to optimize for space survival, why would we
| pick something that is a threat to humans.
|
| Space travel involves humans in an inescapable environment,
| without access to many medical therapies, and with
| potentially compromises immune systems! [0]
|
| Seems like a strange choice.
|
| Future news: "Drug resistant bacteria impossible to purge
| from Starship Mars Flyby 1. Sick astronauts turn strange
| color, sweat strange substance. Want to come home, but have
| 90% of their journey ahead. Fearing their novel infection,
| NASA tells them "Don't come back!", sends them erroneous
| course corrections. Bacteria researchers from 2024
| experiment, jubilant at this dramatic evidence of their
| success, request more funding and astronauts."
|
| [0] https://www.popsci.com/science/space-immune-system-t-
| cell-ge...
| benterix wrote:
| > Seems like a strange choice.
|
| Well, we can either pretend it didn't happen and ignore
| it, or do the opposite and study it well so that one day
| we understand what makes them so efficient at dealing
| with X rays and existing drugs.
| nothercastle wrote:
| CDC is on it they just need to post some hand washing
| signs at the iss
| T-A wrote:
| > Of all the strains of bacteria that we might give an
| opportunity to optimize for space survival, why would we
| pick something that is a threat to humans.
|
| These bacteria were not intentionally brought to the ISS,
| they hitched a ride in/on the crews and colonized the
| station. From the paper [1]:
|
| _We obtained 211 assembled genomes, annotated as E.
| bugandensis, from the publicly available National Center
| for Biotechnology Information's (NCBI) GenBank sequence
| database [20]. Among these genomes, 12 were isolated from
| three different locations aboard the ISS during the first
| Flight of the MT-1 mission: four from the Air Control
| (AC) samples, one from the Advanced Resistive Exercise
| Device (ARED), and seven from the Waste and Hygiene
| Compartment (WHC). Additionally, one metagenome-assembled
| genome (MAG) was recovered from the WHC samples._
|
| [1]
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10960378/
| Nevermark wrote:
| Thanks! I didn't pick up on the bacteria simply being
| discovered!
|
| Makes much better sense.
| mort96 wrote:
| I mean they're studying the bacteria, not "optimizing
| them for space travel".
|
| And... the bacteria which are a threat to humans are
| _exactly_ the ones we are interested in studying, because
| knowing more about them helps us figure out how to make
| them be less of a threat to humans.
| RantyDave wrote:
| Quite. It sounds like they only got there in the first
| place because normally astronauts are given half their
| bodyweight in antibiotics to prevent exactly this from
| happening. And it did. Except for the drug resistant ones.
|
| Question is: will it mutate into something which is no
| longer drug resistant? And is there any compelling reason
| for it to do so?
| im3w1l wrote:
| So this is the first discovery of an extraterrestrial species
| right, because that's pretty neat.
| hpeter wrote:
| It's not alien origin, it came from earth. Maybe it's post-
| terrestrial ?
| im3w1l wrote:
| The prefix _extra-_ just means beyond /outside. It lives
| outside Earth (Terra) so it's extraterrestrial. Though if you
| said it's not diverged enough to be a separate species that
| would be a better objection.
| captainkrtek wrote:
| Somewhat related given the isolation element, pretty interesting:
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2130424/
| yosito wrote:
| Imagine that, life in different environments evolving and
| adapting to fit those environments... Someone should propose a
| theory about this, they could call it the Theory of Evolution.
| livingsystems wrote:
| Oh crap, only problem though is the only observable science
| we've done on this kind of evolution left E.coli to remain as
| E.coli after 75000 generations (Lenski experiments), leaving no
| clue about how the simplest known living cell with some 400+
| genes (at ~1k bases each roughly speaking) arose,
| unfortunately.
|
| But let's just call this evolution and pretend that it explains
| something of the goo-to-you type of evolution most people think
| about when talking about evolution!
| candiodari wrote:
| Well, if that means Humans can't reasonably leave earth, it's
| going to suck.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| humans could just suck it up and, you know, make earth not
| suck
|
| like if we can't terraform terra, how tf are we doing that to
| a barren rock 1 year away with no atmosphere?
| vundercind wrote:
| The amount of free "capital" (if you will) for maintaining
| life that you get on Earth is truly enormous. The mind
| strains to imagine the costs of building and maintaining
| all that somewhere that has almost none of it, _and_ is
| very far from Earth.
|
| Other planets are... kind super-duper terrible. Space
| itself is even worse.
| verisimi wrote:
| That article is so low on detail! There's basically just this
| statement:
|
| > Study findings indicate under stress, the ISS isolated strains
| were mutated and became genetically and functionally distinct
| compared to their Earth counterparts. The strains were able to
| viably persist in the ISS over time with a significant abundance.
| E. bugandensis coexisted with multiple other microorganisms, and
| in some cases could have helped those organisms survive.
|
| The bacteria changed (how, why, can we see?), they survived in
| space (plainly the _original_ bacteria also survived long enough
| to evolve), and possibly adapted /coexisted with other (unnamed)
| microorganisms.
|
| And then they were brought back to earth to be studied.... That
| too surely impacts the study of 'bacteria in space'.
| se4u wrote:
| Details are in the actual paper, and its linked prominently but
| it take a few clicks to get there.
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10960378/
|
| There's even a video abstract!
| thedrexster wrote:
| video abstract direct link (40.7MB mp4):
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10960378/bin/40.
| ..
| verisimi wrote:
| I've skimmed this, it makes no sense to me. There are some
| graphics. There are things like this:
|
| > The ISS genomes exhibited an average of 4568 genes, a
| significantly higher count than the average of 4416 genes
| found in the Earth genomes.
|
| Yes, 4568 is a significantly higher count than 4416. But if I
| took samples of this bacteria from different countries, would
| I see a similarly significantly different count? I've no
| idea.. is this even significant without this sort of
| comparison?
|
| I watched the video too. This really is just a bunch of stock
| footage, with the same info as the linked NASA article.
|
| Do others find this info to be compelling of anything? It
| seems that this could be a PR piece of some sort, for 'space
| science'. I don't get the significance.
| nabla9 wrote:
| This is even worse than it sounds.
|
| Long periods in zero gravity impair astronauts' immune system.
| Astronauts experience skin rashes and upper respiratory symptoms
| from mild to difficult during long-duration spaceflights.
|
| New bacteria in a closed environment with immune-compromised
| people can be life threatening if they can't get back to the
| Earth.
|
| Pneumonia in space could kill. Gravity is used to clear lungs.
| Postural drainage https://www.physio-pedia.com/Postural_Drainage
| positions help to keep lungs clear. Astronauts drowning in their
| own fluids one after another would kill long range manned
| missions for NASA.
| lupusreal wrote:
| It seems easy to prevent a disease found on the ISS from
| infecting deep space missions; just don't link the two up.
| Maybe those other missions will develop their own strains in
| time, but with fewer people coming and leaving it should be
| easier to keep the spacecraft clean and healthy by starting out
| that way. Also the ISS has been occupied for 23 years with this
| issue only becoming apparent recently, so that seems like a
| pretty good run.
| nabla9 wrote:
| ISS is not special. Strains found on earth did not evolve
| into drug resistant variants. E. bugandensis is multi-drug
| resistant resistant on Earth variants too.
|
| You can use quarantine to guard against many virus
| infections, but bacteria that always gets into space with
| humans is persistent threat. It's annoying when near Earth,
| but Mars missions must learn how to deal with emergencies.
| dogtorwoof wrote:
| I do wonder about cosmic radiation and it's ability to
| cause mutations to DNA. Could be part of the reason why
| there's increased resistance.
| nabla9 wrote:
| It seems that microgravity itself increases resistance.
| Bacteria show enhanced growth, increased virulence, higher
| resistance to antibiotics, and increased biofilm formation in
| microgravity.
|
| https://theconversation.com/as-if-space-wasnt-dangerous-
| enou...
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| It does seem like artificial gravity is absolutely necessary
| for long-term missions...
| exe34 wrote:
| I wonder if a small scale centrifuge (think hospital bed on
| an office chair) could be useful to flush out the liquid
| content of the lungs every few hours?
| rtkwe wrote:
| Space is a big issue, to subject the person's whole body to
| the force in the same direction you'd need it to be at
| least 2x larger around than the tallest person you're going
| to send through it which AFAIK isn't possible anywhere on
| the ISS at the moment. BEAM may have had just enough space
| before it was converted to a cargo module.
| exe34 wrote:
| That's why I was suggesting just an office chair and a
| hospital gurney - to flush out the lungs, you probably
| don't need to worry about making the whole person
| experience uniform spin gravity, just shake it out of the
| lungs!
| rtkwe wrote:
| You could maybe have them kneel on a spinning platform
| instead but I think you would still want their head on
| the same side of the rotation axis as their feet for
| example. Also I wonder how long you'd need to do this to
| allow the body to properly clear the built up fluids.
| airstrike wrote:
| Vomit Comet 2000: now with extra phlegm!
| seydor wrote:
| It does seem like we need to take a page from those wise
| bacteria: You can't survive in space without genetic
| modification
| hpeter wrote:
| The question is, when will humanity become wise enough to
| catch up with the technology? Probably never.
| Weryj wrote:
| Wise enough, never. Smart enough, we already are.
|
| Sadly, we're not both at the same time and the results
| are in one of the Sci-fi books.
| z3t4 wrote:
| It would probably only take one or two generations to
| adapt, if the offspring dies before reproductive age -
| evolution is cruel, but it can be effective.
| macintux wrote:
| Evolution takes a lot longer than a couple of generations
| to make effective changes.
| airstrike wrote:
| Unfortunately bacteria reproduce and evolve much faster
| than we can, so for practical purposes we likely can't
| really genetically engineer our way out of this
| zanfr wrote:
| I doubt it is about gravity; it is also about the horrifying
| air quality on the ISS
| echelon wrote:
| We evolved to fit the environment of our gravity well like a
| glove. There's a lot that just doesn't work optimally without
| the envelope of gas exchange, temperature ranges, nutrient
| inputs, and standard gravity we have on earth.
|
| This is why I find the idea of humans colonizing the galaxy
| ridiculous. It won't happen unless we change our bodies
| substantially. We're just animals. Animals fit to the
| conditions of earth. (But quite honestly, it'll likely be
| machine intelligences that inherit the stars instead of us
| with our biological shortcomings.)
| op00to wrote:
| I think we are within grasping range of genetic engineering
| humans to eliminate a lot of the more "interesting" bits of
| biology, but we are waiting for the commercial requirements
| to be there before really making things happen.
| jessetemp wrote:
| How do you genetically engineer a resistance to fluid in
| the lungs, or radiation exposure, or whatever all the
| other interesting ways to die in space are?
|
| Imagine all the suffering caused by failed attempts,
| people living their whole life with bad lungs so a
| privileged few can get a little closer to their space
| fantasy. I wouldn't want to be born into that experiment
| api wrote:
| Space stations need spin gravity for long duration use.
|
| As far as living on other planets goes: there is gravity.
| What we don't know is how much gravity we need. We could
| answer this with a space station with spin gravity by
| trying different rotational velocities and monitoring the
| health effects.
|
| The Moon has about 1/6 Earth gravity. Is that enough? We
| don't know. Mars has a little over 1/3.
|
| Long duration space flight probably needs spin gravity too.
| There are two ways to do it. One is a torus shaped
| spacecraft. The other is two spacecraft and a tether where
| once they insert themselves into their cruise transfer
| orbit they link, extend the tether, and start orbiting each
| other in a spin configuration. People could go between the
| ships if necessary by following the tether, though this
| would probably only be done when strictly necessary due to
| the risks.
|
| There's a calculator online for spin gravity based on what
| we currently know about human tolerance for the Coriolis
| effect:
|
| https://www.artificial-gravity.com/sw/SpinCalc/
|
| It's not too bad. There are various workable sweet spots.
| Playing around I find one at 20 meter radius and 0.66g
| (2/3) gravity. It looks like you can't get much smaller
| than 15 meters diameter without ill effects, but we
| actually don't know. We need to try this to see what humans
| can actually adjust to.
|
| The simplest test short of a centrifugal station would be
| to put two capsules or Starships in orbit and tether them
| and experiment with different tether lengths and rotational
| velocities.
|
| Edit: actually there's a third way to do gravity on long
| duration flights. If you watched/read The Expanse you saw
| it. Accelerate to the midpoint, flip, decelerate to the
| destination. Unfortunately that requires insane physicsts'
| nightmare propulsion systems like the fusion engines in The
| Expanse that we do not have and won't have for the
| foreseeable future unless there are some crazy fusion
| breakthroughs.
| aftbit wrote:
| Yeah if we had some kind of unlimited propulsion systems,
| the Expanse trajectory would be optimal in so many ways.
| Forget about transfer orbits - just point at the target
| and burn.
|
| The Expanse subreddit has a lot of people doing math on
| such things.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/TheExpanse/comments/128c8rv/upda
| te_...
| api wrote:
| AFAIK the Epstein drive from The Expanse is pretty much
| at the edge of known physics in terms of being plausible,
| with a few additional caveats.
|
| The biggest of these is that IRL those ships would have
| to have large heatsinks. Even if the drive were
| phenomenally efficient you're going to have a minimum of
| hundreds of megawatts of waste heat to radiate into space
| to avoid melting the ship.
|
| The second one is that the drive itself would be a deadly
| weapon. Those scenes in The Expanse where they fire up
| the drive near other ships or near space stations? Nope,
| not unless you want to fry everyone on board with X-rays.
| You wouldn't fire up a drive anywhere _near_ anything you
| didn 't want to cook with hard radiation.
|
| This last point is known as Jon's Law in space
| engineering and sci-fi: any sufficiently powerful space
| drive is also by definition a weapon of mass destruction.
| wnoise wrote:
| Also known as the Kzinti Lesson, from Niven's "Known
| Space".
|
| https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WeaponizedExh
| aus...
| EGreg wrote:
| Why not just use rotation to generate artificial gravity
| via centrifugal force?
|
| I guess the answer could be that the sideways motion will
| drive you crazy due to coriolis forces? See 6 minutes in
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxeMoaxUpWk
|
| But they can just substitute windows with monitors that
| compensate for the view.
|
| Incidentally, the viewscreens on Star Trek etc. always had
| the ship right side up, so they probably compensated
| exactly in this way :)
| prerok wrote:
| In Star Trek they had gravity plating, so that defined
| which way is down.
|
| Needless to say, we have no idea yet how that would even
| be possible :) So, for now, the question is whether we
| can still do it without such a solution.
| jwells89 wrote:
| The way I see it, it's a matter of creating suitable
| environments for humans in space. For the most part, that's
| perfectly achievable even with current technology; the
| primary bottleneck is quantity of building materials, as
| human-friendly habitats are by necessity large and complex
| (space for centrifugal gravity, plus room to move around
| for mental health, plus space for all the requisite air
| process facilities and such).
|
| So this is another area where bringing down cost of pound
| to orbit is highly impactful. If that becomes cheap, it
| becomes feasible to build in orbit crafts (orbital
| stations, ships, etc) sufficiently large to support human-
| friendly habitats. Should Starship+Superheavy succeed, it
| will be a significant step forward in this regard since it
| can put the interior volume of the ISS in orbit in a single
| launch, and perhaps in a few decades use of resources mined
| from asteroids could become a consideration.
| nabla9 wrote:
| I think it is. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40273790
|
| Submarines and Navy ships have similar dry air.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| It's almost certainly because the microbiome of the station
| and occupants rarely changes.
|
| You see a similar weakening of the immune system in people
| who obsessively disinfect their homes. Our immune system
| needs to be exposed to stuff constantly.
| Neil44 wrote:
| They should call this the Andromeda strain
| dtx1 wrote:
| Do you want an Andromeda Strain? This is how we get Andromeda
| Strains!
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| Don't worry, Ford Prefect was from Andromeda and nothing
| happened...
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Wasn't something like this the basis for _The Andromeda Strain_?
| The twist at the end seems to indicate the ultimate source of the
| bug.
| downrightmike wrote:
| No, The whole thing starts when they launch a rocket outside of
| our atmosphere to collect samples and then it comes back down.
|
| That bacteria basically evolves to consume energy and evolve to
| different forms of energy. Like at first it is pulling apart
| minerals in rocks to eventually pulling plastic bonds apart.
| Eventually it becomes harmless because energy is abundant on
| Earth and it seems to be intelligent as it evolves very
| quickly, and it only kills people in the early evolutions (by
| accident) and doesn't end up killing the scientists in the lab.
| Or the rest of life on earth.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Cool. Thanks for the explanation.
|
| Been quite a while since I've seen the movie.
| amelius wrote:
| How many of our bacteria made their way to Mars?
| thebeardisred wrote:
| Is the header image a screenshot of Windows Media Player?
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