“One of many extra comparable environments to the ISS was within the isolation dorms on the UCSD campus through the COVID-19 pandemic. All surfaces have been repeatedly sterilized, in order that microbial signatures can be erased by the point one other individual would present up,” Benitez stated. So, one of many first options to the ISS microbial range drawback he and his colleagues steered was that they maybe ought to ease up on sterilizing the station a lot.

“The intensive use of disinfection chemical compounds won’t be the most effective method to sustaining a wholesome microbial surroundings, though there may be actually loads of analysis to be performed,” Benitez stated.

House-faring gardens

He steered that introducing microbes which are useful to human well being could be higher than continually struggling to wipe out all microbial life on the station. And whereas some modules up there do have to be sterilized, maintaining some useful microbes alive could possibly be achieved by designing future spacecraft in a approach that accounts for the way the microbes unfold.

“We discovered that microbes in modules with little human exercise have a tendency to remain in these modules with out spreading. When human exercise is excessive in a module, then the microbes unfold to adjoining modules,”  Zhao stated. She stated spacecraft could possibly be designed to place modules with excessive human exercise at one finish and the modules with little to no human exercise on the reverse finish, so the busy modules don’t contaminate those that want to stay sterile. “We’re after all speaking as microbiologists and chemists—maybe spacecraft engineers have extra urgent causes to place sure modules at sure spots,” Zhao stated. “These are simply preliminary concepts.”

However what about crewed deep house missions to Mars and different locations within the Photo voltaic System? Ought to we fastidiously design the microbial composition beforehand, plant the microbes on the spacecraft and hope this synthetic, closed ecosystem will work for years with none interventions from Earth?

“I’d take a extra holistic ecosystem method,” Benitez stated. He imagines sooner or later we might construct spacecraft and house stations internet hosting whole gardens with microbes that may work together with vegetation, pollinators, and animals to create balanced, self-sustaining ecosystems. “We’d not solely want to consider sending the astronauts and the machines they should perform, but in addition about all different lifeforms we might want to ship together with them,” Benitez stated

Cell, 2025. DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2025.01.039