Shuttle brings space-grown strep bacteria back...(a cold-storage experiment locker that ke...)

On day five of the mission, with the shuttle docked to the International Space Station, the crew raised the canisters and their contents to just above human body temperature and incubated them there for 15 and a half hours. Then they transferred them to a super-cold freezer on the ISS, which dropped the temperature of the canisters to 139 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.

That locked the bacteria at whatever stage they were at, whatever genes they were expressing and whatever proteins they had present were locked in, because no more metabolism was occurring, Niesel said. So we get a picture of what they were like in space at that time, which is the cool part.

Control experiments conducted on Earth followed every step of the process as it was done in orbit, with canister transfers even timed to the minute. Now we have two snapshots of the bacteria frozen in time, grown with the same parameters except the microgravity part, and we should be able to see the differences that result when the bacteria see this unique space environment, Niesel continued.

The bacteria are expected to arrive in Galveston later this week or early next week, kept cold with dry ice all the way to maintain them just as they were in orbit. Once he gets the bacteria in his lab, Niesel plans to conduct complete protein and genetic analyses, as well as possible virulence studies in laboratory mice.

Seeing the Endeavour land was the culmination of many years of preparation, persistence and uncertainty we were originally scheduled to fly shortly after the Columbia accident but its been worth the wait to get the chance to make one of the first studies of an opportunistic pathogen in space, Niesel said. We think i
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