Our project involves synthesizing microbial data from past spacecrafts, namely the Apollo, ISS, Mir, and Skylab missions. So far, we have a spreadsheet of categorized microbial data taken from previous studies; we also generated some visualizations and have preliminary theories surrounding microbial contamination and health risks during spaceflight. Below we linked both parts of the research we have done together so far. We are open to all ideas on how to advance or improve our project in any way. Please let us know if you are interested! @MicrobesAWG@ben.sikes@katherine.j.baxter@daniela.bezdan@jaume.puig@S_muntaha2002@jgalazka
Hi @anagha.ravi & @Janani_Krishakumar, I really enjoyed yesterday’s presentations, especially the research on Microbial Profiling of Spacecraft Environments: MIR to Skylab. The work was both fascinating and very relevant to my own interests in microbiology and space environments. I would love to get involved with this project or collaborate in any way possible, whether through data analysis, literature review, or contributing to future studies.
Hi @anagha.ravi - I’m sorry I was late to the meeting and missed your talk (sounds exciting). We did some reanalysis work comparing (just 16S) in the destiny (US lab) and harmony (node 2, with crew quarters/2 sleeping stations) could be useful to feed into some preliminary theories. It’s a technical paper but has the ISS comparison at the end: https://enviromicro-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1462-2920.14632
This work goes back to Apollo, Mir, Skylab, Shuttle too Nick. As @ben.sikes pointed out, the differing methodology assays (likely microscopy in ~1972), are going to make a full comparative analysis tricky, but likely can still summarize across many many space missions.
Also very much appreciated the presentation and your enthusiasm for summarizing microbial changes across places. I’m glad to help as I’m able and I can join a meeting if you set it up.
It’s likely important to set explicit boundaries (to start) on where and what you want to compare. Nick linked a good paper. There are several other recent datasets and papers on ISS microbiomes:
Are you using the ISS cultures in your poster @anagha.ravi? Do you all want to expand to include amplicon sequencing and metagenomes data too? @anna.simpson led/was involved with much of the recent metagenomics that was done on ISS by JPL. My student and I also visited JSC, where Sarah Castro-Wallace’s group has a ton of (as far as I know) unpublished data on the ISS microbiome. They were doing 16S and ITS sequencing of swabs for a long time (swabs sent back down) but also led the development of Nanopore sequencing on the ISS, which is used now I think.
Certainly things we can discuss in the meeting. Depending on your goals, we can try and drag some of these people into the conversation. It’s probably also important to figure out how you can be supported financially or in other ways to actually do the work?
Hi Ben, yes the dataset I used for the ISS microbial analysis involved cultures. They are specifically air, water, and surface samples collected onboard the ISS. Samples were cultured either in-flight or after return to Earth, and bacterial isolates were identified using 16S rDNA sequencing and rep-PCR fingerprinting. I linked the specific research paper I used below.
Applying metagenomics and amplicon sequencing would be a great way to learn more about this data; we would love to learn more about implementing that approach. Sarah’s research sounds really interesting and would be a great way to reanalyze the microbial profiles of the ISS environments; it would really help update and modernize the trends I noticed when graphing the different microorganisms found aboard the ISS. The data that I used is from the early 2000s, and it would be amazing to use more recent data to get a better picture of the modern ISS microbiome. Janani and I are working to set up a meeting and we would love to hear exciting ways to further our research. Thank you for your guidance!
I’m Yuanzhe (Anthony) Chen, a Master’s student in Electrical Engineering at UNSW Sydney, focusing on AI-based modeling and control systems. I’m very interested in joining your Microbial Profiling from Apollo to ISS project — I can help with data visualization, clustering, or AI-assisted pattern analysis of the microbial datasets. Please let me know if I can join or contribute to your ongoing work.
