Thanks to a crew of Chinese astronauts and the Shenzhou Space Biotechnology Group, we’re now aware of a new kind of bacteria. And how they found it is only a little bit scary…
Niallia tiangongensis is a hardy little bacterium scooped from the walls of China’s Tiangong space station. And no, they didn’t bring it up there with them. No one had ever seen or heard of it before it mysteriously appeared aboard the station.
The microbe was recently introduced to the world via a paper in the International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology, and it’s not your garden-variety germ. It’s a distant cousin of Niallia circulans, a common Earth bacterium found in soil and sewage.
Unlike its planet-bound relatives, N. tiangongensis has figured out how to survive the cosmic radiation and low gravity. It does so by gobbling up gelatin to build itself a stress-proof shell.
Collected by the Shenzhou-15 crew back in 2023, this discovery sure sounds a lot like alien invasion science fiction stories. But it’s actually much more practical science than that.
While its Earth relatives are mostly harmless (one of them can give you sepsis if you have a weakened immune system, but every family has one bad apple), the real value here is in what this discovery tells us about how life changes to adapt to the cold, uncaring harshness of space.
The big lesson we learned here is that microbes can mutate in orbit. It’s not exactly a new lesson. NASA found that out the hard way when their Jet Propulsion Lab discovered mutant strains of Enterobacter bugandensis aboard the ISS.
Understanding how these microscopic stowaways evolve in orbit is key to keeping astronauts alive and space stations functional. As the researchers noted, studying these adaptable lifeforms gives us critical insight into how to protect crews on long-duration missions.
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