Smashing
into a solid wall at 670 miles per hour doesn’t even leave a mark. Brigham
Young University Chemistry professor Daniel Austin and his graduate students
are learning just how hard it can be to kill bacteria.
The
research group, funded by NASA, is studying high velocity impact of bacterial
spores. More specifically, the group is trying to find the speed limit above
which bacteria won’t survive when they crash into a hard surface.
“There
should be a velocity at which they’ll splat and die, but we haven’t reached
it,” Austin says. “We can get pretty close to the speed of sound, and we’re
planning to go to higher velocities in the near future, but it’s not easy to
do.”
To
test velocity, bacteria are loaded into a vacuum chamber and then launched by a
blast of air at speeds nearing 300 meters per second.
The
group’s recently published study in Planetary and Space Science is the first of
its kind to test the impact survivability rate of bare bacteria.
Although
the main focus of the research is answering the question of how much force
the bacteria can withstand, NASA has funded the research because of the
planetary protection implications of the study: if bacteria can survive the
ejection from one planet and the impact of landing on another planet, there are
potential concerns about cross contamination of bacteria between those planets.
However, Austin is quick to acknowledge that there are other factors, like UV
light, that may kill the bacteria in transition.
Even
though the initial publication’s lead authors Brandon Barney and Sara Pratt
have graduated, Austin continues to mentor current students as they develop the
research. The group is now collaborating with Microbiology professor Richard
Robison as they continue the quest for higher impact speeds. They anticipate
that blasting bacteria at one kilometer per second (more than 2,200 miles per
hour) should be more than enough to kill the bacteria, but the group hasn’t yet
been able to create those speeds in the lab.
“We
seem so frequently surprised at what bacteria can survive, and this just adds
to the list,” Austin says. “Our understanding of the limits of life have
expanded a lot since the 1970s as we find bacteria surviving and even thriving
under extreme conditions.”
Posted by Dr. Tim Sandle
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