Bacteria From Beer Lasts 553 Days In Space

An anonymous reader writes "Some specific bacteria colonies from Beer (the place, not the beverage) left for several days outside the ISS actually survived extreme temperatures, UV and other radiations, lack of water and all the like. They were later brought back to Earth for examination: such resistant bacteria may be the base of life support systems or bio-mining on colonies off Earth, and of course for terraforming, eventually. No clue in the article about how dangerous those bacteria might have become after the exposure or when they'll start eating their examiners."

Comments

Complication for mars missions?

[The_mad_linguist]

Just goes to show how difficult it will be to confirm whether or not any life found on Mars was there to begin with, or was introduced accidentally.

Re:Complication for mars missions?

[Graff]

It's pretty unlikely that any Martian microbes will be strains at all similar to ones found on Earth - billions of years of evolution will have resulted in wildly different genomes and selected behaviours.

Then if we find microbes on Mars the question will be are they ones native to Mars or just recent ones from Earth that have undergone rapid mutation and evolution in the face of radiation and other radical environmental factors during the journey and the stay on Mars? Yes, there are some ways of classifying such mutated bacteria but it will still muddy the waters a bit.

In the end the question becomes kind of moot anyways. Either way, if life can survive on Mars it will be an exciting discovery.

The trick...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The survival capabilities of various earthly extremophiles are, indeed, extremely impressive. Particularly the ones resistant to extreme dessication, the evolutionary changes for which often happen to confer substantial radiation resistance.

The trouble, though, is that for this to be useful to us, they need to do more than survive(if survival were an issue, we could just put them inside the spaceship, not outside), we need them to be capable of metabolism and reproduction in extreme environments. You can transport in a climate controlled spaceship, and grow in a biodome; but if your tardigrades or bacteria just shrivel up and go into stasis when you put them outside they aren't going to get much done.

There are a fair number of organisms that basically shrivel up into an invincible spore, resistant to just about everything, when life starts to suck. If you put them outside on mars, they'd probably be just fine a century later if taken in and re-hydrated. It's just that they would have done basically nothing during that time...