Non-random genetic alterations in the cyanobacterium Nostoc sp. exposed to space conditions

Kurzfassung

Understanding the impact of long-term exposure of microorganisms to space is critical in understanding how these exposures impact the evolution and adaptation of microbial life under space conditions. In this work we subjected Nostoc sp. CCCryo 231-06, a cyanobacterium capable of living under many diferent ecological conditions, and also surviving in extreme ones, to a 23-month stay at the International Space Station (the Biology and Mars Experiment, BIOMEX, on the EXPOSE-R2 platform) and returned it to Earth for single-cell genome analysis. We used microfuidic technology and single cell sequencing to identify the changes that occurred in the whole genome of single Nostoc cells. The variant profle showed that bioflm and photosystem associated loci were the most altered, with an increased variant rate of synonymous base pair substitutions. The cause(s) of these non random alterations and their implications to the evolutionary potential of single bacterial cells under long-term cosmic exposure warrants further investigation.