The evolution of viruses and bacteria in space.

There are viruses that infect bacteria, and they are very interesting because they allow us to fight bacteria that are very dangerous for humans, some bacteria that we do not have medicines to cure us, this discovery, that there are viruses that go against bacteria, was made at the beginning of the 20th century, they were discovered independently by Frederick Thor in 1915 and by Félix de Hered In 1917, the latter was the one who gave the name bacteriophages from the Greek for bacteria-devouring and quickly tried to do therapeutic experiments with these viruses.

This researcher applied these viruses in humans to treat cases of dysentery and the administration solved it. By administering these viruses that eliminated the bacteria that caused dysentery, he managed to eliminate the problem that these people had. He also tested them with salmonella and it worked quite well, but those viruses were viruses that were found in nature and that were identified as interesting because they attacked bacteria that were harmful to humans.

Creating mutant versions, that is, taking a virus and modifying it in some way or forcing it to be modified in the way that interests us, these are things that began in the 80s, the first attempts, but large-scale experiments did not begin to be developed until the beginning of 2000, in 2019 a combination of natural viruses was used where several specific ones were selected, they did not become mutant viruses, but they were specifically selected for the treatment of the 15-year-old girl who was found admitted in critical condition, and they could die, this happened in London due to an infection by bacteria resistant to antibiotics, it is something tremendous, then at the end of that year 2019 the pandemic broke out and information about virus therapies or experiments with mutant viruses was blocked in the media and social networks, but that does not mean that it had stopped, there has been tremendous progress.

On January 13, 2026, the University of Wisconsin-Madison published this statement announcing that researchers from its university led by Professor Vatsan Raman had sent a couple of bacteria to the international space station, a couple that was a bacteria and a virus so that they could interact violently, because I don't think that bacteria would do well with that type of virus, specifically, the E. coli battery, which is one of those that humans have in their intestines and that normally It is not dangerous, but certain strains can cause diarrhea, that is in the best of cases, and can escalate to organ failure or even death, but that bacteria has a natural predator virus, Phage T7, a long-studied phage that infects bacteria to bacteria and kills E. coli.

What was done was to send these two, the bacteria and the T7 virus, to space and an identical sample of quantity and strain was left on Earth, exactly the same, which remained on Earth as a control sample, there in space, in the international station, in the microgravity station, since they incubated the samples for a long time. Then they brought back those versions evolved in space after generations of bacteria and viruses and analyzed the genomic sequence of each of them, scanned the mutations and discovered shocking things.

The first, in microgravity the infection is slower, the phages infect and kill the bacteria, but the process is slower compared to the process on Earth, this is logical, it is because in microgravity there is less mixing of fluids, the particles do not fall or move due to gravity, which makes physical contact between phages and bacteria difficult. The second most interesting point, both in space, bacteria and viruses evolved differently and here we have the good part and the bad part.

The bacteria, E. coli, accumulated unique mutations thanks to the space environment, it achieved changes in the receptors on its surface so that the phage, the virus that attacks it, became less attached, that is, it had mutations that favored it to be more resistant and also improved its survival under the stress of microgravity and the space environment. The viruses, the T7 also mutated, but in a different way, apparently, it suffered changes in the tail proteins, which improved its binding to the bacterial receptors and in this way it turned out to be much more efficient in some cases, in fact, when they tested these mutant T7 viruses on especially resistant pathogenic strains of E.coli, because not all Ecoli strains are the same, there are strains that even the T7 cannot attack because they are very resistant strains of E. coli, however, This mutant virus, space T7, turns out to be able to attack those most dangerous bacteria and kill them.

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