p2pnet news | Off Topic:- No, it’s not the title from a sci-fi horror movie.

Space bugs or, rather bacteria carried into space aboard a shuttle, mutated to the extent they were three times Moore deadly than in their previous earthly forms.

Cheryl Nickerson at Arizona State University in Tempe, US, and her colleagues launched Salmonella typhimurium into space aboard the shuttle Atlantis in September 2006, says New Scientist, going on:

The shuttle returned after 12 days, during which time the microbes had altered the way they express 167 genes compared with bacteria that remained on Earth.

The team found that these space-mutated bugs were almost three times as likely to kill infected mice compared with their ground-grown counterparts. That could be bad news if the results hold true for astronauts, since some experiments suggest the weightlessness of space travel suppresses the immune system.

Their results are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences which, “describes how the bugs became more virulent in the wake of a 12 day flight on board space shuttle mission STS-115 (September 2006) where bugs were tended by astronaut Heidemarie M Stefanyshyn-Piper,” says The Telegraph, adding:

“While infectious disease events have occurred and continue to occur in spaceflight, for the most part, they have been fairly minor in incidence,” said Prof Nickerson.

“However, as the duration and distance of future spaceflight missions in increased, including lunar colonization and a mission to Mars, the risk for infectious disease events is also increased. This is especially true given that data indicates that the astronauts immune system may not function as well in spaceflight as on Earth.”

(The pic is from WikiVisual.)

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Also See:
New Scientist – Space creates mutant ’superbugs’, September 24, 2007
The Telegraph – Spaceflight ‘makes bacteria more deadly’, September 24, 2007

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