Space changed gut bacteria of these twin astronauts quoting : Futurity

Fluctuations in the same bacterial groups were seen in Mark Kelly, the control twin on Earth, but the fluctuations were not as great as those seen in Scott Kelly in space. Follow Futurity RSSTwitterFacebookNewsletterResearchers studying the gut microbes of Scott and Mark Kelly, NASA astronauts and identical twin brothers, have found that spaceflight causes changes, but it's not clear what the changes mean. The surprise finding was that a change in diversity of gut microbes (the number of different species) was not observed in Scott Kelly while in space. While Scott spent nearly a year in space, his brother, Mark, remained on Earth, as a ground-based control. Differences in the viral, bacterial and fungal populations between Scott Kelly and Mark Kelly were pronounced at all time points; however, this was expected when comparing different individuals, even identical twins.




"Right now, we do not see anything alarming or scary—the Kelly twins seem to have healthy gut microbiomes." The surprise finding was that a change in diversity of gut microbes (the number of different species) was not observed in Scott Kelly while in space. The balance returned to pre-flight levels when Scott Kelly returned to Earth. Credit: NASA Northwestern University researchers studying the gut bacteria of Scott and Mark Kelly, NASA astronauts and identical twin brothers, as part of a unique human study have found that changes to certain gut "bugs" occur in space. "We will be working closely with the other Twins Study teams to piece together a more complete picture of the effects of long space missions," Turek said.

How a year in space affected the bacteria in Scott Kelly's gut

In fact, the researchers thought the space station food might cause his gut bacteria to be less diverse in space, but the opposite turned out to be true. We don't know what's driving it."The researchers do have a few theories though, and diet is definitely one of them. "Some of the gut bacteria is normally introduced in the food, so we thought there might be a loss in some species," says Vitaterna. The Northwestern researchers don't know which group of bacteria had higher concentrations in Scott's gut, only that there was a major shift in the ratio between the two. "We don't know what it is about the spaceflight environment that's driving this change."As for the source of this imbalance, that's still an open question.



collected by :Lucy William

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