Diamond Member SpaceMan 0 Posted December 16, 2025 Diamond Member Share Posted December 16, 2025 2 min readPreparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater) This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up Microbiology Laboratory at JSC NASA. Microorganisms and Spaceflight Spaceflight poses a risk of adverse health effects due to the interactions between microorganisms, their hosts, and their environment. The JSC Microbiology team addresses the benefits and risks related to microorganisms, including infectious disease, allergens, environmental and food contamination, and the impacts of changes in environmental and human microbial ecology aboard spacecraft. The team includes certified medical technologists, environmental microbiologists, mycologists, and biosafety professionals. The JSC Microbiology laboratory is a critical component of the Human Health and Performance Directorate and is responsible for addressing crew health and environmental issues related to microbial infection, allergens, and contamination. This responsibility is achieved by operational monitoring and investigative research using classical microbiological, advanced molecular, and immunohistochemical techniques. This research has resulted in a significant number of presentations and peer-reviewed publications contributing to the field of Microbiology with articles in journals such as Infection and Immunity, Journal of Infectious Disease and Applied and Environmental Microbiology, Nature Reviews Microbiology, and Proceedings of the National Academies of Science. Fun Fact: Microorganisms display unexpected responses when grown in the spaceflight environment compared to otherwise identically grown microbes on Earth. This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up NASA This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up Christian Castro is streaking bacteria to be characterized using a variety of culture media. Photo Date: May 29, 2018. Location: Building 21 – Microbiology Lab. NASA Keeping Crew-members Safe As a functional part of the Crew Health Care System and in support of Environmental Control and Life Support Systems engineers, the Microbiology Laboratory team defines requirements, coordinates and analyzes microbial sampling, and analysis of air, surface, and water samples. These environmental samples, including preflight and in-flight samples, re-analyzed to ensure that microorganisms do not adversely affect crew health or system performance. Microbiologists also serve as team members when anomalous events occur that might affect crew health or life support systems operations. Spaceflight food samples also are evaluated preflight to decrease the risk of infectious disease to the crew. This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up A crewmember identifies unknown environmental microbes aboard the ISS through DNA sequencing.NASA Technology and Hardware ABI DNA sequencer Illumina MiSeq desktop sequencer Oxford Nanopore Technologies MinION DNA / RNA sequencers Agilent Bioanalyzer VITEK 2 Microbial Identification Space analogue bioreactors This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up An example of in-flight Surface Sampler Kit results with growth of fungal cultures after 5 daysNASA Points of Contact Mark Ott, PhDSarah Wallace, PhDHang Nguyen, PhD Human Health and Performance Capabilities Share Details Last Updated Dec 16, 2025 EditorRobert E. LewisLocationJohnson Space Center Related Terms This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up Explore More This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up Article 3 years ago This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up Article 3 years ago This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up Article 3 years ago Keep Exploring Discover More Topics From NASA Humans In Space This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up Missions This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up International Space Station This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up Solar System This is the hidden content, please Sign In or Sign Up 0 Quote Link to comment https://hopzone.eu/forums/topic/293184-nasa-microbiology/ Share on other sites More sharing options...
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