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How microbes survive clean rooms and contaminate spacecraft
- raverbashing 8y agoTl;Dr: consuming ethanol from the cleaning products and surviving the corresponding oxidative stress
- danieltillett 8y agoWell I guess that answers the question if there is life on mars.
- gnulinux 8y agoWhat are you trying to say?
- e1ven 8y agoI suspect his point is that due to sending rovers to mars, there likely is life there, now at least.
- danieltillett 8y agoExactly. Actually it is near certain that there is life on Mars now since we know the spacecraft sent were not sterile.
- lordelph 8y agoBut it's a godawful small affair
- gnulinux 8y agoWhy are you so sure? Are you an expert in extremophile metabolism? I find it very unlikely that an Earthling could survive in Mars, microorganism or not, it would be a chain of miraculous events for an Earthling metabolism to find enough processible energy in Mars.
- avar 8y agoHas there been a study addressing whether these clean rooms are completely counterproductive to their stated goal? It seems intuitive to me that if you're maintaining such a clean room the only bacteria that are going to live there are ones hardy enough to survive in those extreme conditions, you're just going to be running an accidental breeding program for bacteria likely to survive on a spacecraft. As opposed to just assembling all this stuff in a room open to the elements. It would then be completely inundated with bacteria, but none of them would have any selective advantage in being hardy. You could even feed them on purpose by spraying food for them everywhere. Then when you launch the spacecraft those fat comfortable bacteria would all instantly die because vacuum isn't an environment that's anything like what they've had to deal with, unlike the hardy ones in the clean room, and the few survivors would have no time to develop hardiness. They'd all die within hours from launch.
- danieltillett 8y agoUnfortunately that is not the way the microbes of this world (and now other worlds) work. The form that is really tough is the bacterial spore (spores are one of the lifecycle stages of some bacteria). These spores can survive in a complete vaccuum for years. The more bacteria you introduce into a system the more spores you will end up with contaminating everything. I personally doubt that this contamination is much of a problem. The planets of the solar system have been dusted in earth rocks containing bacterial spores thrown up by large asteroid strikes for billions of years.
- dom96 8y agoIt's certainly a problem when the spacecraft's job is to detect life on other planets. If the spacecraft is contaminated with Earth microbes then it will get a false positive which is a huge problem.
- credit_guy 8y agoThere’s zero chance any scientist will mistake the DNA of an existing Earth microbe with alien life.
- TheSpiceIsLife 8y agoI don’t know what Kleenol 30 is, but I would have thought it obvious that ethanol and isopropyl alcohol are insufficient to sterilise. My immediate thought with regard to cleanliness is always moulds. It’s not clean until it’s been soaked in sodium hypochlorite and sodium hydroxide, UV sterilised, gamma irradiated, then parked in a decaying orbit above the sun.
- lkrubner 8y ago"I would have thought it obvious that ethanol and isopropyl alcohol are insufficient to sterilise" Especially since no hospital would rely on just ethanol and isopropyl. You'd think they'd at least try to live up to the standards of a hospital.
- TheSpiceIsLife 8y agoConsider also that hospitals are a good place to hang out if you want to get a cleaning product and antibiotic resistant bacterial infection.
- bloopernova 8y agoThis is why I covered my existing procedure "wounds" with loads of vaseline and securely bandaged them, before I went in for another, longer, procedure. The nurses and doctors were completely understanding and made sure to tell anyone involved, which was good to hear. Of course, I'm not sure how effective that sort of prep would be, but I hope I reduced my risk, at least.
- TheSpiceIsLife 8y agoThat’s probably a really good idea, smart thinking. It’s a wonder hospitals don’t require existing wounds to be dressed in touch a way prior to admission.
- raverbashing 8y agoIt's a different issue. You can't autoclave your spaceship for example. Or use the same substances they use, though you might be able to use other ones
- jesperlang 8y agoI assume they mean sterile when they say clean. Why do we still insist only on sterile environments? Shouldn't we focus on creating small eco systems that are suitable for humans, where probably lots of different microbes that are beneficial to us are included..
- gnulinux 8y agoIf the ecosystem we're visiting already has life, our life might destroy that life.
- whatshisface 8y agoThe point is, we don't want to start ecosystems on the planets and moons of the solar system until we're good and ready - and have checked that nothing was already there.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoSo we need bacterivirous nanobots ... (We'll probably make self-replicating ones that destroy all life.)
- pocketstar 8y agoA bacteriophage? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacteriophage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacteriophage
- zaarn 8y agoNature already invented those and they kill off 30% of life in the oceans every day (of course, by the end of the day the bacteria on the other end of this battle have replicated again). Bacteriophages are what you want, you just need to find the right strain.
- glenneroo 8y agoA short animated introduction to Bacteriophage by Kurzgesagt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YI3tsmFsrOg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YI3tsmFsrOg
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoBacteriophage means "bacteria eater" but my understanding was from a brief review that they don't eat them so much as use them as host? Roundworms, acari, springtails, and such eat bacteria though; they're apparently known collectively as detritivores.
- zaarn 8y agoThey don't really eat them, correct. Instead they force the bacteria to produce new phages until it explodes under internal pressure and dies. Plus, phages are viruses, unlike roundworms and the like, they can survive centuries without food. They also, as mentioned, account for 30% of death in marine life every day, biggest killer organism on this planet. There is phage-therapy too, an alternative to anti-biotics, where you are given a dosage of phages in an infected area. Due to their nature they only attack specific strains of bacteria and can easily eradicate the entire population within a few hours.
- curtis 8y agoI wonder if this is the wrong way to go about it. You could design a spacecraft so it's heat resistant, and then once it's fully assembled, stick it in an oven and heat it to say 200C and just let it sit for a couple of days, or however long it takes to heat all the way through. I'm sure this would present some design challenges, but it doesn't seem to me like it would be insurmountable.
- jrockway 8y agoHeating something doesn't necessarily kill all life: https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/nature/life-in-extreme-heat.htm https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/nature/life-in-extreme-heat.h...
- curtis 8y agoI think you can pretty much kill anything if you heat your spacecraft enough. Of course, you might kill the spacecraft too. It might be very difficult indeed to destroy certain types of spores, and the "cook the spacecraft until they're all dead" approach might be possible but completely impractical for any real budget. Obviously any temperature that's hot enough to melt standard space-hardened circuit boards is going to be difficult. On the other hand, it sounds like the clean room approach is no panacea either. As an interesting tangent, the engineering used to design a heat-resistant spacecraft might be re-used to design a long-lived Venus surface probe.
- curtis 8y agoApollo 12 landed right next to the Surveyor 3 lander, and the astronauts removed a few pieces from it and returned with them. When NASA disassembled the video camera later they found microorganisms still alive on the device. This article asserts that this was the result of a clean room failure after the parts were returned to Earth: https://www.space.com/11536-moon-microbe-mystery-solved-apollo-12.html https://www.space.com/11536-moon-microbe-mystery-solved-apol.... This is not as exciting as the notion that some bacteria might have survived for years inside the lander on the Lunar surface, but it still illustrates the risks of failing to maintain a proper clean room environment.
- msds 8y agoThis is kinda my space right now - remarkably hard-to-kill bacteria. Some fun stuff: 1) Ralstonia pickettii doesn't really need much to eat, and thus thrives in ultra-pure water systems. Like, you know, the ones used to make medical devices. 2) Stuff in the Burkholderia cepacia complex is naturally resistant to lots of antibiotics, but also tolerates chlorhexidine gluconate and various quaternary ammonium disinfectants. Well, ok, more than tolerates - they'll happily colonize the disinfectant solutions, and then infect whatever you're trying to "disinfect". 3) Deinococcus radiodurans seems almost engineered to survive interstellar travel, but that's probably just a coincidence. Anything that can survive 15,000 Gray is scary. 4) Bacillus altitudinis is pretty weird too - like the name says, it's been found up to 40ish-km, which is an odd place for things to grow.
- domsl 8y agoWow that's very interesting. What do they do with 1) and 2)? Just accept it or kill it another way? Why is 3) so resistant against radiation? Does it repair DNA damage faster than it occurs? Do you mind me asking if you're working in industry or are in academia/research? :)
- msds 8y agoKill it some other way, and frequently test things that should be 'sterile'. I don't actually study (3) particularly, nor am I a biologist. As far as I understand, the "how" question is pretty well studied, and is because it's pretty aggressive with DNA repair, and has lots of various tricks to facilitate that and minimize damage from occurring in the first place. The question of "why" is (in my mind) more interesting, and less understood - it may be due to evolving to deal with prolonged dehydration, which is a much more useful ability for life on earth. IDK. R&D at a startup.
- domsl 8y agoThanks for the reply – I actually thought there was some stuff no bacteria could live in and that probably exists, but then you also get problems with the things you are trying to desinfect.
- sycren 8y agoRather than try to remove all contaminants, is it possible to mark them with an indicator of their origin?
- theshadowknows 8y agoIs it possible that in millions of years the microorganisms we have inadvertently sent to Mars will evolve? Even in the short term, that seems like an interesting experiment in itself.
- VLM 8y agoThe politics of this discussion is amazing in the sense that we can have a non-political discussion of if bacteria born on earth and growing on mars are earth life or mars life or is it morally right or wrong to transport life or "contaminate" existing cultures. However the analogy is nearly perfect if we're debating if someone born in Syria and living in England is a Syrian-lifeform or a English-lifeform and is it morally or ethically OK to "contaminate" cultures. Its interesting in that without political agitation this relatively calm and straightforward discussion is what immigration debate would look like, but we're not allowed not to be politically agitated to a certain outcome, for some reason. Or, with a hundred years of political "progress" and parallel technological advance, immigration to Mars will have a political dimension such that sterilizing in satellite-grade clean rooms and talking about contamination fears will sound like pro-nazi death camp talk to future politically active young multicultural people living on Mars and the legacy Earth.