More than 200 people have crossed the airlock threshold to the International Space Station to conduct research that benefits people on Earth and the agency’s Journey to Mars. The microbes they brought with them—and left behind—are the focus of a new collaborative research opportunity from NASA and the non-profit Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Humans bring microbes everywhere they go—some of which reside inside the body, such as the intestinal tract. Others are outside the body on skin and clothes, for example. When these collective microbial communities enter a human-made environment like the International Space Station they create their own microbial ecosystem known as the Microbiome of Built Environments (MoBE).
NASA is seeking proposals from postdoctoral fellows to analyze the microbial communities inside the space station to determine how the communities colonize, adapt and evolve. The researchers will have access to a collection of space station microbial samples gathered over a decade or more, and archived at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
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