Team:UA Huntsville/Human Practices
Human Practices
For decades, Escherichia coli has been a model organism. E. coli has been used to help learn more about everything from transcription to translation, from plasma membranes to metabolism. Studying E. coli and other bacterial species have allowed us to learn more about how cells function and how organisms interact with one another. The applications are limitless, from medicine to fuel to food production and beyond.
In space, living organisms react very differently than on earth. Organisms have evolved in response to Earth’s gravity, and have learned to adapt to that gravity. Research conducted in microgravity environments eliminates gravity as a factor, and allows a deeper focus on cellular growth, protein synthesis, and metabolism. As such, much research occurs on payloads in orbit and on the ISS using various species of bacteria. Space, however, is filled with dangers with ionizing radiation is chief among them. Radiation limits the lifetime of bacterial cultures, and increases the mutation rate in their DNA.
That’s where our project comes in. Bacteria need to survive higher doses of radiation and resist mutations to be useful for space-based research. Our project seeks to engineer a new strain, dubbed Cosmicoli, that scientists at NASA can use for longer-running experiments. Huntsville is one of the chief centers of NASA operations, which means our research labs are only a few miles from several large space-based government subcontractors and the Marshall Space Flight Center. We hope to significantly augment NASA research with our project, lending to projects on a range of subjects. We hope to work with NASA scientists in the future to develop cosmicoli further.