China has launched its Tianwen-1 mission to Mars. A rocket holding an orbiter, lander, and rover took flight from the country’s Hainan province earlier this week, with hopes to deploy the rover on Mars’s surface by early next year.

Similarly, the launch of the Emirates Mars Mission last Sunday marked the Arab world’s foray into interplanetary space travel. And on July 30, we expect to see NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover finally take off from Florida, ScienceAlert reported.

For many nations and their people, space is becoming the ultimate frontier. But although we’re gaining the ability to travel smarter and faster into space, much remains unknown about its effects on biological substances, including us.

While the possibilities of space exploration seem endless, so are its dangers. And one particular danger comes from the smallest life forms on Earth: bacteria.

Bacteria live within us and all around us. So whether we like it or not, these microscopic organisms tag along wherever we go – including into space. Just as space’s unique environment has an impact on us, so too does it impact bacteria.

We don’t yet know the gravity of the problem

All life on Earth evolved with gravity as an ever-present force. Thus, Earth’s life has not adapted to spend time in space. When gravity is removed or greatly reduced, processes influenced by gravity behave differently as well.

In space, where there is minimal gravity, sedimentation (when solids in a liquid settle to the bottom), convection (the transfer of heat energy), and buoyancy (the force that makes certain objects float) are minimized.

Similarly, forces such as liquid surface tension and capillary forces (when a liquid flows to fill a narrow space) become more intense.

It’s not yet fully understood how such changes impact lifeforms.

How bacteria become more deadly in space

Worryingly, research from space flight missions has shown bacteria become more deadly and resilient when exposed to microgravity (when only tiny gravitational forces are present).

In space, bacteria seem to become more resistant to antibiotics and more lethal. They also stay this way for a short time after returning to Earth, compared with bacteria that never left Earth.

Adding to that, bacteria also seem to mutate quicker in space. However, these mutations are predominately for the bacteria to adapt to the new environment – not to become super deadly.

More research is needed to examine whether such adaptations do, in fact, allow the bacteria to cause more disease.

Bacterial teamwork is bad news for space stations

Research has shown space microgravity promotes biofilm formation of bacteria.

Biofilms are densely-packed cell colonies that produce a matrix of polymeric substances allowing bacteria to stick to each other, and to stationary surfaces.

Biofilms increase bacteria’s resistance to antibiotics, promote their survival, and improve their ability to cause infection. We have seen biofilms grow and attach to equipment on space stations, causing it to biodegrade.

For example, biofilms have affected the Mir space station’s navigation window, air conditioning, oxygen electrolysis block, water recycling unit, and thermal control system. The prolonged exposure of such equipment to biofilms can lead to malfunction, which can have devastating effects.

Another effect of microgravity on bacteria involves their structural distortion. Certain bacteria have shown reductions in cell size and increases in cell numbers when grown in microgravity.

In the case of the former, bacterial cells with the smaller surface areas have fewer molecule-cell interactions, and this reduces the effectiveness of antibiotics against them.

Moreover, the absence of effects produced by gravity, such as sedimentation and buoyancy, could alter the way bacteria take in nutrients or drugs intended to attack them. This could result in the increased drug resistance and infectiousness of bacteria in space.

All of this has serious implications, especially when it comes to long-haul space flights where gravity would not be present. Experiencing a bacterial infection that cannot be treated in these circumstances would be catastrophic.

The benefits of performing research in space

On the other hand, the effects of space also result in a unique environment that can be positive for life on Earth.

For example, molecular crystals in space’s microgravity grow much larger and more symmetrically than on Earth. Having more uniform crystals allows the formulation of more effective drugs and treatments to combat various diseases including cancers and Parkinson’s disease.

Also, the crystallization of molecules helps determine their precise structures. Many molecules that cannot be crystallized on Earth can be in space.

So, the structure of such molecules could be determined with the help of space research. This, too, would aid the development of higher-quality drugs.

Optical fiber cables can also be made to a much better standard in space, due to the optimal formation of crystals. This greatly increases data transmission capacity, making networking and telecommunications faster.

As humans spend more time in space, an environment riddled with known and unknown dangers, further research will help us thoroughly examine the risks – and the potential benefits – of space’s unique environment.

Chinese public health authorities are taking precautions to prevent a bubonic plague outbreak in a remote northern region after a herder contracted the disease, although the risk of large-scale infections is low with the availability of modern medicine, the Washington Post reported.

The health commission in Bayannur city in the region of Inner Mongolia raised its public health warning to its third-highest of four alert levels on Sunday and banned the hunting, skinning and transportation of rodents that might carry the bacteria, known as Yersinia pestis. The municipal government raised its alert level by one notch to “standard plague outbreak alert,” which meant humans have been infected.

“There is a risk of a human plague epidemic spreading in this city,” Bayannur’s local health commission said in a statement.

Over the past year, China has reported five cases of the disease associated with some of the deadliest pandemics in human history. The plague caused the Black Death that devastated the population of medieval Europe and repeatedly afflicted Asia, but it has largely been controlled since the mid-20th century.

A World Health Organization spokeswoman in Geneva said Tuesday that the plague case count in China was low and the agency did not consider it high risk, but it was monitoring the situation, Reuters reported.

Under the new measures announced in Bayannur, which will remain in effect until 2021, suspected cases of plague among human patients or sick and dead marmots must be reported immediately. The city of Beijing also urged residents on Monday not to go camping in Inner Mongolia, a vast strip of scenic grassland and desert that urban dwellers often visit.

Because the plague and cholera are the only two diseases that fall under China’s highest classification of transmissible diseases that require the most urgent countermeasures — coronavirus is considered second-tier — parts of the northern grasslands could reenter lockdown just weeks after the country began to recover from COVID-19.

Officials at Inner Mongolia’s regional center for disease control have warned that the plague may have long been circulating locally and there is risk of human-to-human transmission and “long-distance transmission,” according to a statement posted online by the regional government last month.

The precautions against the plague are a reminder of the public health challenges facing Chinese authorities. Last week, Chinese state-affiliated researchers published a paper warning about a new type of swine flu that has been discovered in pig farmers with the potential to cause a pandemic.

So far, China’s official case numbers remain low with five plague diagnoses since last year; four patients came from Inner Mongolia and recovered normally while one man in Gansu Province died. Chinese authorities have not released details about the causes or circumstances of the cases.

In the adjacent country of Mongolia, farther north, two herders died last year after eating marmot meat and contracting the disease.

The plague, which researchers generally believe originated from the Asian steppes, killed tens or hundreds of millions of people in several deadly waves throughout history. One particularly deadly wave in the 14th century traveled along the Mongol Empire’s flourishing trading routes and killed one-third of the population in Europe in what became known as the Black Death.

The disease continues to surface periodically around the world. More than 300 cases were found in a minor outbreak in Madagascar last year, killing about 30. The plague, which is carried by rats and fleas, is usually treatable with antibiotics in its “bubonic” form, which attacks lymph nodes and causes fevers and boils. But the bacteria can kill quickly if it infects the respiratory system or bloodstream in rarer conditions known as pneumonic and septicemic plague.

The United States averages about seven cases a year, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Chinese officials say they have largely suppressed the disease since the 1950s and recorded about 30 cases in the last decade.

Farmers will no longer need to buy and spread fertilizer for their crops, and increased food production will benefit billions of people around the world, who might otherwise go hungry.

These statements may sound like something out of a science fiction novel, but new research by Washington University in St. Louis scientists show that it might soon be possible to engineer plants to develop their own fertilizer. This discovery could have a revolutionary effect on agriculture and the health of the planet, Phys reported.

The research, led by Himadri Pakrasi and Maitrayee Bhattacharyya-Pakrasi, was published in the May/June issue of mBio.

Creating fertilizer is energy intensive, and the process produces greenhouse gases that are a major driver of climate change. And it’s inefficient. Fertilizing is a delivery system for nitrogen, which plants use to create chlorophyll for photosynthesis, but less than 40 percent of the nitrogen in commercial fertilizer makes it to the plant.

After a plant has been fertilized, there is another problem: runoff. Fertilizer washed away by rain winds up in streams, rivers, bays and lakes, feeding algae that can grow out of control, blocking sunlight and killing plant and animal life below.

However, there is another abundant source of nitrogen all around us. The Earth’s atmosphere is about 78 percent nitrogen, and the Pakrasi lab in the Department of Biology just engineered a bacterium that can make use of that atmospheric gas—a process known as “fixing” nitrogen—in a significant step toward engineering plants that can do the same.

The research was rooted in the fact that, although there are no plants that can fix nitrogen from the air, there is a subset of cyanobacteria (bacteria that photosynthesize like plants) that is able to do so. Cyanobacteria can do this even though oxygen, a byproduct of photosynthesis, interferes with the process of nitrogen fixation.

The bacteria used in this research, Cyanothece, is able to fix nitrogen because of something it has in common with people.

“Cyanobacteria are the only bacteria that have a circadian rhythm,” Pakrasi said. Interestingly, Cyanothece photosynthesize during the day, converting sunlight to the chemical energy they use as fuel, and fix nitrogen at night, after removing most of the oxygen created during photosynthesis through respiration.

The research team wanted to take the genes from Cyanothece, responsible for this day-night mechanism, and put them into another type of cyanobacteria, Synechocystis, to coax this bug into fixing nitrogen from the air, too.

To find the right sequence of genes, the team looked for the telltale circadian rhythm. “We saw a contiguous set of 35 genes that were doing things only at night,” Pakrasi said, “and they were basically silent during the day.”

The team, which also included research associate Michelle Liberton, former research associate Jingjie Yu, and Deng Liu manually removed the oxygen from Synechocystis and added the genes from Cyanothece. Researchers found Synechocystis was able to fix nitrogen at 2 percent of Cyanothece. Things got really interesting, however, when Liu, a postdoctoral researcher who has been the mainstay of the project, began to remove some of those genes; with just 24 of the Cyanothece genes, Synechocystis was able to fix nitrogen at a rate of more than 30 percent of Cyanothece.

Nitrogen fixation rates dropped markedly with the addition of a little oxygen (up to 1 percent), but rose again with the addition of a different group of genes from Cyanothece, although it did not reach rates as high as without the presence of oxygen.

“This means that the engineering plan is feasible,” Pakrasi said. “I must say, this achievement was beyond my expectation.”

The next steps for the team are to dig deeper into the details of the process, perhaps narrow down even further the subset of genes necessary for nitrogen fixation, and collaborate with other plant scientists to apply the lessons learned from this study to the next level: nitrogen-fixing plants.

Crops that can make use of nitrogen from the air will be most effective for subsistence farmers—about 800 million people worldwide, according to the World Bank—raising yields on a scale that is beneficial to a family or a town and freeing up time that was once spent manually spreading fertilizer.

“If it’s a success,” Bhattacharyya-Pakrasi said, “it will be a significant change in agriculture.”

A Russian experiment called ‘Biorisk’ has revealed that various microorganisms from Earth were able to survive in the harsh conditions of space on the surface of the International Space Station (ISS). It was carried out starting in January 2005 at the Russian segment of the ISS and saw 68 different organisms, including bacteria, insects, vertebrate animal and higher plants, used as test subjects, RT reported.

The mutated bacteria showed high aggressiveness and resistance to antibiotics on their return to Earth, the Russian report, prepared for the meeting of the International Committee on Space Research in the US later in July, said.

Eggs of crustaceans and caviar of African toothcarp fish also managed to survive in outer space for 2.5 years, with the embryos revived after returning to Earth, it added.

“The living organisms are capable of surviving in outer space. Hypothetically, in distant future, the arrival of alien substances from other planets to Earth may be possible as well as to other planets from Earth,” the report said, as cited by RIA-Novosti.

“In addition, the danger is posed by terrestrial microorganisms that returned from space after visiting another planet and transforming in an unknown manner in its atmosphere,” it added.

According to the paper, the Russian scientists are going to use the result of their research to develop measures aimed at protecting Earth form this threat.

The findings of the ‘Biorisk’ experiment “are not only of significant scientific interest, but also invaluable from the practical point of view for the justification of the planetary quarantine strategy during future interplanetary flights,” the report said.

The principle of “planetary defense,” aimed at preventing the contamination of Earth by alien organisms and vice versa, is used by international space agencies during all interplanetary missions. The Committee on Space Research, which is based in the French capital of Paris, has been in charge of planetary defense since 1959.