Spaceflight makes bugs deadlier

London: In what sounds like the plot of a fifties B movie, scientists have shown that food poisoning bugs become more deadly if they venture into space.

The team that reports the find suspects that other species of bacteria are likely to respond to spaceflight in a similar way, so that the manned space programme to the Moon and Mars could be a spur for the development of more deadly bugs in some circumstances. However, the good news is that they understand why the bacteria have become nastier, highlighting a new target for antibiotics.

Just as space flight has been shown to have a profound impact on human physiology, a new study led by the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University has shown that the tiniest passengers flown in space - microbes - can be equally affected.

Profs Cheryl Nickerson and lead author James Wilson, both in ASU's School of Life Sciences, performed the study to investigate the effect of space flight on the genetic responses and disease-causing potential of Salmonella typhimurium, the main bacterial culprit of food poisoning.

Their results, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows the bugs became more virulent in the wake of a 12- day flight on board space shuttle mission last September. Compared to bacteria that remained on Earth, the space-travelling Salmonella were almost three times as likely to kill mice, the study showed.