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Bacterial Virulence and Prevention for Human Spaceflight

With the advancement in reusable rocket propulsion technology, space tourist trips into outer space are now becoming a possibility at a cost-effective rate. As such, astronauts will face a host of health-related challenges, particularly on long-duration space missions where maintaining a balanced he...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Wazir, Hakim Ullah, Narang, Pooja, Silvani, Giulia, Mehner, Christine, Poole, Kate, Burke, Catherine, Chou, Joshua
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10058866/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36983812
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/life13030656
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author Wazir, Hakim Ullah
Narang, Pooja
Silvani, Giulia
Mehner, Christine
Poole, Kate
Burke, Catherine
Chou, Joshua
author_facet Wazir, Hakim Ullah
Narang, Pooja
Silvani, Giulia
Mehner, Christine
Poole, Kate
Burke, Catherine
Chou, Joshua
author_sort Wazir, Hakim Ullah
collection PubMed
description With the advancement in reusable rocket propulsion technology, space tourist trips into outer space are now becoming a possibility at a cost-effective rate. As such, astronauts will face a host of health-related challenges, particularly on long-duration space missions where maintaining a balanced healthy microbiome is going to be vital for human survival in space exploration as well as mission success. The human microbiome involves a whole list of micro-organisms that reside in and on the human host, and plays an integral role in keeping the human host healthy. However, imbalances in the microbiome have been directly linked to many human diseases. Research findings have clearly shown that the outer space environment can directly affect the normal microbiome of astronauts when the astronaut is exposed to the microgravity environment. In this study, we show that the simulation of microgravity on earth can mimic the outer space microgravity environment. Staphylococus aureus (S. aureus) was chosen for this study as it is an opportunistic pathogen, which is part of the normal human skin microflora and the nasal passages. This study’s results show that S. aureus proliferation was significantly increased under a microgravity environment compared to Earth’s gravity conditions, which complements previous work performed on bacteria in the outer space environment in the International Space Station (ISS). This demonstrates that this technology can be utilised here on Earth to mimic the outer space environment and to study challenging health-related questions. This in return saves us the cost on conducting experiments in the ISS and can help advance knowledge at a faster rate and produce countermeasures to mitigate the negative side effects of the hostile outer space environment on humans.
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spelling pubmed-100588662023-03-30 Bacterial Virulence and Prevention for Human Spaceflight Wazir, Hakim Ullah Narang, Pooja Silvani, Giulia Mehner, Christine Poole, Kate Burke, Catherine Chou, Joshua Life (Basel) Article With the advancement in reusable rocket propulsion technology, space tourist trips into outer space are now becoming a possibility at a cost-effective rate. As such, astronauts will face a host of health-related challenges, particularly on long-duration space missions where maintaining a balanced healthy microbiome is going to be vital for human survival in space exploration as well as mission success. The human microbiome involves a whole list of micro-organisms that reside in and on the human host, and plays an integral role in keeping the human host healthy. However, imbalances in the microbiome have been directly linked to many human diseases. Research findings have clearly shown that the outer space environment can directly affect the normal microbiome of astronauts when the astronaut is exposed to the microgravity environment. In this study, we show that the simulation of microgravity on earth can mimic the outer space microgravity environment. Staphylococus aureus (S. aureus) was chosen for this study as it is an opportunistic pathogen, which is part of the normal human skin microflora and the nasal passages. This study’s results show that S. aureus proliferation was significantly increased under a microgravity environment compared to Earth’s gravity conditions, which complements previous work performed on bacteria in the outer space environment in the International Space Station (ISS). This demonstrates that this technology can be utilised here on Earth to mimic the outer space environment and to study challenging health-related questions. This in return saves us the cost on conducting experiments in the ISS and can help advance knowledge at a faster rate and produce countermeasures to mitigate the negative side effects of the hostile outer space environment on humans. MDPI 2023-02-27 /pmc/articles/PMC10058866/ /pubmed/36983812 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/life13030656 Text en © 2023 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Wazir, Hakim Ullah
Narang, Pooja
Silvani, Giulia
Mehner, Christine
Poole, Kate
Burke, Catherine
Chou, Joshua
Bacterial Virulence and Prevention for Human Spaceflight
title Bacterial Virulence and Prevention for Human Spaceflight
title_full Bacterial Virulence and Prevention for Human Spaceflight
title_fullStr Bacterial Virulence and Prevention for Human Spaceflight
title_full_unstemmed Bacterial Virulence and Prevention for Human Spaceflight
title_short Bacterial Virulence and Prevention for Human Spaceflight
title_sort bacterial virulence and prevention for human spaceflight
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10058866/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36983812
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/life13030656
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