No Effect of Microgravity and Simulated Mars Gravity on Final Bacterial Cell Concentrations on the International Space Station: Applications to Space Bioproduction.

ABSTRACT: Microorganisms perform countless tasks on Earth and they are expected to be essential for human space exploration. Despite the interest in the responses of bacteria to space conditions, the findings on the effects of microgravity have been contradictory, while the effects of Martian gravity are nearly unknown. We performed the ESA BioRock experiment on the International Space Station to study microbe-mineral interactions in microgravity, simulated Mars gravity and simulated Earth gravity, as well as in ground gravity controls, with three bacterial species: Sphingomonas desiccabilis, Bacillus subtilis, and Cupriavidus metallidurans. To our knowledge, this was the first experiment to study simulated Martian gravity on bacteria using a space platform. Here, we tested the

SUBMITTER: Santomartino R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7591705 | biostudies-literature | 2020

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature