{"id":11221,"date":"2026-01-14T18:33:06","date_gmt":"2026-01-15T00:33:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/?p=11221"},"modified":"2026-01-14T18:33:08","modified_gmt":"2026-01-15T00:33:08","slug":"viruses-may-be-more-powerful-in-the-international-space-stations-microgravity-environment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/2026\/01\/14\/viruses-may-be-more-powerful-in-the-international-space-stations-microgravity-environment\/","title":{"rendered":"Viruses may be more powerful in the International Space Station&#8217;s microgravity environment"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"panel body-content\"><div class=\"panel__container\">\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.space.com\/space-exploration\/international-space-station\/viruses-may-be-more-powerful-in-the-international-space-stations-microgravity-environment\">Space<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Microgravity pushed evolution into corners of the phage we still don&#8217;t fully understand&#8221; The International Space Station (ISS) is a closed ecosystem, and the biology inside it \u2014 including its microbial residents \u2014 don&#8217;t necessarily behave the same way on our home planet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>To better understand how&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.space.com\/the-universe\/moon\/how-bacteria-could-help-build-and-maintain-cities-on-the-moon\"><u>microbes<\/u><\/a>&nbsp;may act differently in space, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison studied bacteriophages \u2014 viruses that infect bacteria, also called phages \u2014 in identical settings both on the&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.space.com\/16748-international-space-station.html\"><u>ISS<\/u><\/a>&nbsp;and on Earth. Their results, published recently in the journal&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/journals.plos.org\/plosbiology\/article?id=10.1371\/journal.pbio.3003568&amp;utm_source=pr&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign=plos006\" target=\"_blank\" aria-label=\"PLOS Biology,, opens in a new window\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><u>PLOS Biology<\/u><u><em>,<\/em><\/u><\/a><em>&nbsp;<\/em>suggest that microgravity can delay infections, reshape evolution of both phages and bacteria and even reveal genetic combinations that may help the performance against disease-linked bacteria on Earth.<a href=\"https:\/\/www.space.com\/space-exploration\/international-space-station\/viruses-may-be-more-powerful-in-the-international-space-stations-microgravity-environment\" target=\"_blank\" aria-label=\", opens in a new window\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;Studying phage\u2013bacteria systems in space isn&#8217;t just a curiosity for astrobiology; it&#8217;s a practical way to understand and anticipate how microbial ecosystems behave in spacecraft and to mine new solutions for phage therapy and microbiome engineering back home.&#8221; Dr. Phil Huss, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and one of the study&#8217;s lead authors, told Space.com.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Space Microgravity pushed evolution into corners of the phage we still don&#8217;t fully understand&#8221; The International Space Station (ISS) is a closed ecosystem, and the biology inside it \u2014 including its microbial residents \u2014 don&#8217;t necessarily behave the same way on our home planet. To better understand how&nbsp;microbes&nbsp;may act differently in space, researchers at the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-and-tech"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11221","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11221"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11221\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11222,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11221\/revisions\/11222"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}