“One of the more similar environments with the ISS was in the insulation of dorms on the UCSD campus during the COVID-19 Pandemie. All surfaces were constantly sterilized, so that microbial signatures would be deleted by the time that another person would appear, “said Benitez. So one of the first solutions to the problem of the ISS -Microbial diversity that he and his colleagues suggested was that they might have to sterilize so much in sterilizing the station.
“The extensive use of disinfection chemicals may not be the best approach to maintain a healthy microbial environment, although a lot of research should certainly be carried out,” said Benitez.
Space -sailing gardens
He suggested that the introduction of microbes that are beneficial for human health is perhaps better than constantly struggling to eradicate all microbial life at the station. And although some modules have to be sterilized there, it can be kept alive of some useful microbes by designing future spacecraft in a way that explains how the microbes spread.
“We found that microbes in modules with little human activity tend to stay in those modules without spreading. When human activity is high in a module, the microbes spread to adjacent modules, “said Zhao. She said that spacecraft could be designed to place modules with a high human activity at one end and the modules with little to no human activity on the other hand, so the busy modules do not contaminate those who have to stay sterile. “Of course we talk as microbiologists and chemists – perhaps engineers of spacecraft have more urgent reasons to place certain modules in certain places,” Zhao said. “These are just preliminary ideas.”
But what about manning deep space emissions for Mars and other destinations in the solar system? Do we have to carefully design the microbial composition in advance, plant the microbes on the spacecraft and hope that this will work artificial, closed ecosystem for years without interventions of the earth?
“I would follow a more holistic ecosystem approach,” said Benitez. He imagines that in the future we can build spacecraft and space stations that host entire gardens with microbes that would interact with plants, pollinators and animals to create balanced, self -sufficient ecosystems. “We should not only think about sending the astronauts and the machines they need to function, but also about all the other life forms that we have to send with them,” Benitez said
Cell, 2025. DOI: 10.1016/J.Cell.2025.01.039
