Appropriate song to play while reading this post: “Fade to Grey” by Visage A new paper in the Journal of Physiological Anthropology touches upon some interesting viewpoints. The paper is called Dysbiotic drift: mental health, environmental grey space, and microbiota, and was written by Alan C Logan. And it’s Open Access, which we all appreciate! The article, which is rather …
An important part of science is owning up to mistakes and doing the best to correct them. A couple months ago we got data from the International Space Station where we had grown up bacteria for our “Microbial Playoffs”. After analyzing the the data we blogged about the winners and disbursed the results far and …
NOTE (3-12-15): THESE RESULTS ARE INCORRECT. We have left them here for comparison. A blog post describing the problem is here and the correct information can be found here. We’ve finished analyzing all the data from the “Microbial Playoffs” part of Project MERCCURI (described here). Each microbe that was chosen to fly to the International …
Analysis of the growth data from space is ongoing but we have some preliminary results to share: Firstly, 47 of the 48 bacteria grew at least a little bit in space, the only exception was the sample collected from the Philadelphia Phillies dugout. Sorry guys! A number of the bacteria grew quite well in fact, …
After 9 months of technical delays, during which time our collection of frozen built environment microbes went around the earth every 90 minutes, we are finally getting growth data from the International Space Station (ISS)! Astronaut Terry Virts has been taking daily growth readings of our collection of 48 microbes and today (Friday) is …
Thanks to a recent tweet, I saw a paper I would have surely otherwise missed: A method for sampling microbial aerosols using high altitude balloons in the Journal of Microbiological Methods. A method for sampling microbial aerosols using high altitude balloons w/ @nbryan5 http://t.co/jyXLOjEdP7 — Cameron Thrash (@DrJCThrash) November 11, 2014 The proud LSU Tiger …
For many years I have been worried about how space travel will affect microbiomes – of the space vehicles and of the residents (people, other animals, plants, etc). This is one of the reasons we started Project MERCCURI and get involved in looking at the microbes on the International Space Station. It is also why …
Well, here is another benefit of automated Google Scholar searches. I think it is unlikely I would have found these new papers without such searches but these are fascinating and directly relevant to many aspects of work we are doing on Project MERCCURI. A series of papers on microbial ecolog and space travel in the …
After 1.5 years of collection events, culturing, identification, and selection of candidates our space microbes experiment finally is in orbit. Our 48 microbes, collected from a variety of built environments on earth, are now whipping around the planet. The rocket took off from Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral at 3:25pm EST yesterday. In a …
Yesterday was to have been the day that our collection of 48 microbes, collected from built environments around the country, were to blast off into space and try growing in microgravity. This would be followed by swabbing of the space station performed by the astronauts. We plan to analyze these swabs using bacterial, archaeal, and …