FOOD-POISONING is bad enough on Earth, but bacteria in space can mutate into super-virulent strains that threaten astronauts’ health.
The finding confirms a long-standing suspicion that microbes hitch-hiking on shuttle missions could mutate in unpredictable ways in micro-gravity.
Cheryl Nickerson at Arizona State University in Tempe and her colleagues sent salmonella bacteria into space for 12 days on the shuttle Atlantis in September 2006. After their trip, the microbes had altered the way they express 167 genes compared with bacteria that had remained on Earth. Not only that, the team found that the space-mutated salmonella was almost three times as…
