
How microbes survive clean rooms and contaminate spacecraft - dnetesn
https://phys.org/news/2018-06-team-microbes-survive-rooms-contaminate.html
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curtis
Apollo 12 landed right next to the Surveyor 3 lander, and the astronauts
removed a few pieces from it and returned with them. When NASA disassembled
the video camera later they found microorganisms still alive on the device.

This article asserts that this was the result of a clean room failure after
the parts were returned to Earth: [https://www.space.com/11536-moon-microbe-
mystery-solved-apol...](https://www.space.com/11536-moon-microbe-mystery-
solved-apollo-12.html).

This is not as exciting as the notion that some bacteria might have survived
for years inside the lander on the Lunar surface, but it still illustrates the
risks of failing to maintain a proper clean room environment.

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theshadowknows
Is it possible that in millions of years the microorganisms we have
inadvertently sent to Mars will evolve? Even in the short term, that seems
like an interesting experiment in itself.

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raverbashing
Tl;Dr: consuming ethanol from the cleaning products and surviving the
corresponding oxidative stress

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VLM
The politics of this discussion is amazing in the sense that we can have a
non-political discussion of if bacteria born on earth and growing on mars are
earth life or mars life or is it morally right or wrong to transport life or
"contaminate" existing cultures. However the analogy is nearly perfect if
we're debating if someone born in Syria and living in England is a Syrian-
lifeform or a English-lifeform and is it morally or ethically OK to
"contaminate" cultures. Its interesting in that without political agitation
this relatively calm and straightforward discussion is what immigration debate
would look like, but we're not allowed not to be politically agitated to a
certain outcome, for some reason. Or, with a hundred years of political
"progress" and parallel technological advance, immigration to Mars will have a
political dimension such that sterilizing in satellite-grade clean rooms and
talking about contamination fears will sound like pro-nazi death camp talk to
future politically active young multicultural people living on Mars and the
legacy Earth.

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sycren
Rather than try to remove all contaminants, is it possible to mark them with
an indicator of their origin?

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curtis
I wonder if this is the wrong way to go about it. You could design a
spacecraft so it's heat resistant, and then once it's fully assembled, stick
it in an oven and heat it to say 200C and just let it sit for a couple of
days, or however long it takes to heat all the way through.

I'm sure this would present some design challenges, but it doesn't seem to me
like it would be insurmountable.

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jrockway
Heating something doesn't necessarily kill all life:

[https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/nature/life-in-extreme-
heat.h...](https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/nature/life-in-extreme-heat.htm)

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curtis
I think you can pretty much kill anything if you heat your spacecraft enough.
Of course, you might kill the spacecraft too. It might be very difficult
indeed to destroy certain types of spores, and the "cook the spacecraft until
they're all dead" approach might be possible but completely impractical for
any real budget. Obviously any temperature that's hot enough to melt standard
space-hardened circuit boards is going to be difficult. On the other hand, it
sounds like the clean room approach is no panacea either.

As an interesting tangent, the engineering used to design a heat-resistant
spacecraft might be re-used to design a long-lived Venus surface probe.

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jesperlang
I assume they mean _sterile_ when they say clean. Why do we still insist only
on sterile environments? Shouldn't we focus on creating small eco systems that
are suitable for humans, where probably lots of different microbes that are
beneficial to us are included..

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whatshisface
The point is, we don't want to start ecosystems on the planets and moons of
the solar system until we're good and ready - and have checked that nothing
was already there.

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msds
This is kinda my space right now - remarkably hard-to-kill bacteria. Some fun
stuff:

1) Ralstonia pickettii doesn't really need much to eat, and thus thrives in
ultra-pure water systems. Like, you know, the ones used to make medical
devices.

2) Stuff in the Burkholderia cepacia complex is naturally resistant to lots of
antibiotics, but also tolerates chlorhexidine gluconate and various quaternary
ammonium disinfectants. Well, ok, more than tolerates - they'll happily
colonize the disinfectant solutions, and then infect whatever you're trying to
"disinfect".

3) Deinococcus radiodurans seems almost engineered to survive interstellar
travel, but that's probably just a coincidence. Anything that can survive
15,000 Gray is scary.

4) Bacillus altitudinis is pretty weird too - like the name says, it's been
found up to 40ish-km, which is an odd place for things to grow.

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domsl
Wow that's very interesting. What do they do with 1) and 2)? Just accept it or
kill it another way?

Why is 3) so resistant against radiation? Does it repair DNA damage faster
than it occurs?

Do you mind me asking if you're working in industry or are in
academia/research? :)

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msds
Kill it some other way, and frequently test things that should be 'sterile'.

I don't actually study (3) particularly, nor am I a biologist. As far as I
understand, the "how" question is pretty well studied, and is because it's
pretty aggressive with DNA repair, and has lots of various tricks to
facilitate that and minimize damage from occurring in the first place. The
question of "why" is (in my mind) more interesting, and less understood - it
may be due to evolving to deal with prolonged dehydration, which is a much
more useful ability for life on earth. IDK.

R&D at a startup.

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domsl
Thanks for the reply – I actually thought there was some stuff no bacteria
could live in and that probably exists, but then you also get problems with
the things you are trying to desinfect.

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danieltillett
Well I guess that answers the question if there is life on mars.

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gnulinux
What are you trying to say?

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e1ven
I suspect his point is that due to sending rovers to mars, there likely is
life there, now at least.

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danieltillett
Exactly. Actually it is near certain that there is life on Mars now since we
know the spacecraft sent were not sterile.

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gnulinux
Why are you so sure? Are you an expert in extremophile metabolism? I find it
very unlikely that an Earthling could survive in Mars, microorganism or not,
it would be a chain of miraculous events for an Earthling metabolism to find
enough processible energy in Mars.

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pbhjpbhj
So we need bacterivirous nanobots ...

(We'll probably make self-replicating ones that destroy all life.)

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zaarn
Nature already invented those and they kill off 30% of life in the oceans
every day (of course, by the end of the day the bacteria on the other end of
this battle have replicated again).

Bacteriophages are what you want, you just need to find the right strain.

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pbhjpbhj
Bacteriophage means "bacteria eater" but my understanding was from a brief
review that they don't eat them so much as use them as host?

Roundworms, acari, springtails, and such eat bacteria though; they're
apparently known collectively as detritivores.

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zaarn
They don't really eat them, correct. Instead they force the bacteria to
produce new phages until it explodes under internal pressure and dies.

Plus, phages are viruses, unlike roundworms and the like, they can survive
centuries without food.

They also, as mentioned, account for 30% of death in marine life every day,
biggest killer organism on this planet.

There is phage-therapy too, an alternative to anti-biotics, where you are
given a dosage of phages in an infected area. Due to their nature they only
attack specific strains of bacteria and can easily eradicate the entire
population within a few hours.

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TheSpiceIsLife
I don’t know what Kleenol 30 is, but I would have thought it obvious that
ethanol and isopropyl alcohol are insufficient to sterilise.

My immediate thought with regard to cleanliness is always moulds.

It’s not clean until it’s been soaked in sodium hypochlorite and sodium
hydroxide, UV sterilised, gamma irradiated, then parked in a decaying orbit
above the sun.

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lkrubner
" _I would have thought it obvious that ethanol and isopropyl alcohol are
insufficient to sterilise_ "

Especially since no hospital would rely on just ethanol and isopropyl. You'd
think they'd at least try to live up to the standards of a hospital.

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TheSpiceIsLife
Consider also that hospitals are a good place to hang out if you _want_ to get
a cleaning product and antibiotic resistant bacterial infection.

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bloopernova
This is why I covered my existing procedure "wounds" with loads of vaseline
and securely bandaged them, before I went in for another, longer, procedure.
The nurses and doctors were completely understanding and made sure to tell
anyone involved, which was good to hear.

Of course, I'm not sure how effective that sort of prep would be, but I hope I
reduced my risk, at least.

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TheSpiceIsLife
That’s probably a really good idea, smart thinking.

It’s a wonder hospitals don’t require existing wounds to be dressed in touch a
way prior to admission.

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avar
Has there been a study addressing whether these clean rooms are completely
counterproductive to their stated goal?

It seems intuitive to me that if you're maintaining such a clean room the only
bacteria that are going to live there are ones hardy enough to survive in
those extreme conditions, you're just going to be running an accidental
breeding program for bacteria likely to survive on a spacecraft.

As opposed to just assembling all this stuff in a room open to the elements.
It would then be completely inundated with bacteria, but none of them would
have any selective advantage in being hardy. You could even feed them on
purpose by spraying food for them everywhere.

Then when you launch the spacecraft those fat comfortable bacteria would all
instantly die because vacuum isn't an environment that's anything like what
they've had to deal with, unlike the hardy ones in the clean room, and the few
survivors would have no time to develop hardiness. They'd all die within hours
from launch.

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danieltillett
Unfortunately that is not the way the microbes of this world (and now other
worlds) work. The form that is really tough is the bacterial spore (spores are
one of the lifecycle stages of some bacteria). These spores can survive in a
complete vaccuum for years. The more bacteria you introduce into a system the
more spores you will end up with contaminating everything.

I personally doubt that this contamination is much of a problem. The planets
of the solar system have been dusted in earth rocks containing bacterial
spores thrown up by large asteroid strikes for billions of years.

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dom96
It's certainly a problem when the spacecraft's job is to detect life on other
planets. If the spacecraft is contaminated with Earth microbes then it will
get a false positive which is a huge problem.

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credit_guy
There’s zero chance any scientist will mistake the DNA of an existing Earth
microbe with alien life.

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brilee
There's an open hypothesis that life may have evolved elsewhere in the
universe and then brought to Earth by some means. DNA would probably have
diverged by now, but who knows?

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havemylife
As I understand it DNA and RNA store their information in the form of certain
amino acids. If other life uses amino acids in a similar fashion they may not
use the same ones that life on Earth uses. Life here uses I believe 20
different amino acids and there are several hundred known.

So there's potential there I would imagine in regards to testing that
hypothesis. However what mainly bothers me with it is that it doesn't explain
the origin of life and why Earth couldn't have original life begin on it.

Unless we can rule out that early Earth conditions would have been too
inhospitable for life to start but was sufficient to sustain it I see no
reason to think an extraterrestrial origin to Earth life is more likely.

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a1369209993
> As I understand it DNA and RNA store their information in the form of
> certain amino acids.

Actually, information is stored as RNA, with DNA as long-term storage
(mnemonic: RAM nucleic acid vs disk nucleic acid) and then amino acids are
assembled into proteins (hardware) based on that information. Proteins only
function as information storage in pathological cases like prions.

But yes, if 'alien' life used the same 20 amino acids, and especially if it
has the same mapping from 64 nucleic acid triplets to 20 amino acids, then
that's confirmation that it's actually just a earth microbe that escaped or
was left behind.

