NASA Study will Help Stop Stowaways to Mars


NASA clean rooms, where scientists and engineers assemble spacecraft, have joined hot springs, ice caves, and deep mines as unlikely places where scientists have discovered ultra-hardy organisms collectively known as 'extremophiles'. Some species of bacteria uncovered in a recent NASA study have never been detected anywhere else.

According to Dr. Kasthuri Venkateswaran, who led the study conducted at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, "These findings will advance the search for life on Mars and other worlds both by sparking improved cleaning and sterilization methods and by preventing false-positive results in future experiments to detect extraterrestrial life."

NASA builds its spacecraft in rooms designed to minimize contamination by airborne particles because dust and its microbial passengers can foul instruments and invalidate experiments. If scientists someday find microbes on Mars, they will want to be sure they aren't just hitchhikers from Earth.

Clean rooms used in the space program already undergo extensive cleaning and air filtering procedures, and the detection technology employed in this study will help NASA to develop and monitor improvements. Still, it is extremely difficult to eliminate all dust particles and microbes without damaging the electronic instruments the process is intended to protect.

Identifying and archiving clean-room microbes serves as an effective backup to the cleaning and sterilization efforts. Armed with a list of microbes that could possibly stow away on its spacecraft, NASA can disregard them if they turn up in future Martian samples.

As reported in FEMS Microbiology Ecology, a journal of the Federation of European Microbiological Societies, Venkateswaran's team used a technology known as ribosomal RNA gene-sequence analysis to detect bacteria in clean rooms at Kennedy Space Center, Johnson Space Center, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This was the first time that this technology was applied to NASA clean rooms.

They found that both the total number of bacteria and the diversity of bacterial species were much higher than previously detected. This has implications not only for NASA and other space agencies, but also for hospital operating rooms and industries such as semiconductor manufacturing, where cleanliness and sterility are critical.

Clean rooms are considered extreme environments for microbes because water and nutrients are in extremely short supply. Nevertheless, some bacteria are able to survive on what little moisture the low-humidity air provides and on trace elements in the wall paint, residue of cleaning solvents, and in the spacecraft materials, themselves.

Notes to editors:

1. The article referred to is Molecular Bacterial Community Analysis of Clean Rooms Where Spacecraft Assembled by Christine Moissl, Shariff Osman, Myron T. La Duc, Anne Dekas, Eoin Brodie, Tadd DeSantis and Kasthuri Venkateswaran FEMS Microbiology Ecology, 61 (3), 509-521, doi: 10.1111/j.1574-6941.2007.00360.x

2. To request an image to accompany the press release, please email: lucy.mansfield@oxon.blackwellpublishing.com

3. Correspondence: Kasthuri Venkateswaran, Biotechnology and Planetary Protection Group; Jet Propulsion Laboratory, M/S 89-2, 4800 Oak Grove Dr, Pasadena, CA 91109, USA. Tel.: +1 8183931481; fax: +1 818 3934176; e-mail: kjvenkat@jpl.nasa.gov

4. FEMS Microbiology Ecology is published on behalf of the Federation of European Microbiological Societies (FEMS), whose main mission is to advance and unify microbiology knowledge. FEMS brings together 46 member societies from 36 European countries, covering over thirty thousand microbiologists. For more information, visit www.fems-microbiology.org


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