Quint Smits
At the intersection of ideas and action, this is Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

My name is Quint Smits, Longitude fellow from Tilburg university. In today’s episode we will be featuring highlights from a conversation I led with Sarah Wallace, a microbiologist at NASA.
She is part of our Edge of Space series, where we explored the roles of individuals, experiences, and cutting-edge technologies that are preparing us for the Moon and beyond.

As an all-around science lover I was interested to hear about anything she had to say, but the application of edge computing in space and the relatively unknown to me application of microbiology in space were the major topics. We started our conversation with her introduction.

Sarah Wallace
I am a NASA microbiologist. I’m over a laboratory of about 17-18 people, so we’re a pretty big lab. We are the microbiology laboratory for the agency. So while NASA has 10 centers around the United States, we are the micro lab, located in Houston, Texas, which is also the home of the astronauts. And you know, for me, I’ve always wanted to work for NASA. Since actually sixth grade, this has been my goal. So I’m proud to say that I’ve made it. And so we do a lot of a lot of different cool stuff. But I think the one thing at the end of the day, our goal is to make sure the astronauts stay safe from any contaminating microbes that could come from the air or the water or the surfaces of Space Station. We also look at the payloads that go up, the food, the cargo, you name it, we look at all of it. But my niche in all of it is that I’m really invested in implementing new technology, because the way that we’ve been doing microbiology in space is the same way we’ve been doing it since the beginning of Space Station. And before that, we only did it on the ground. So that relies on culture plates, traditional petri dishes and things like that. And my passion has really been to enable new technology. And we actually put a DNA sequencer on the ISS. And we developed the methods to allow us to be able to go from a swab to a sequencer of anything and be able to detect those microbes without having to culture them, which I think is going to be really, really important as we move beyond ISS and head back to the moon and onto Mars.

Quint
So what led you to fall in love with NASA in the sixth grade?

Sarah
So I have to give all the credit to my sixth grade science teacher. His name was Jim Lester. I grew up in a very small town in Kansas. Very small town. But about an hour from our small town was another small town, Hutchinson, Kansas, and it’s home of the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center. And it really is world renowned for its collection of spaceflight memorabilia. So as the largest collection of spaceflight artifacts, both US and Russian—Soviet at the time—anywhere in the world, that, you know, for a nerd, it’s just the coolest place ever. And they had a space camp. And so my sixth grade science teacher took us on a back scenes tour of the Space Camp. And that was it. I begged my parents to let me go that summer. And I went that summer. And then they had an advanced camp the following summer and I went to that as well. And ever since then I’ve had a laser focus on getting to NASA. So I gotta give him all the credit for introducing all of us kids to that world and teaching us. You know, he taught us so much more than the order of the planets in the solar system. He taught us NASA history and this really cool thing that none of us had lived through, which was the moon landing. He made it so cool. And I’ve been in love ever since.

Quint
So then of all the things you can do at NASA, why microbiology?

Sarah
Most people don’t even know there is a microbiology lab, so that happened during my undergrad when I was working on my undergrad degree. Science has always been my thing. Like always. I joke and you know, when I talk to other students I tell them, STEM is really important. You don’t have to be good at every aspect of it. I’m not great at math. You know, in the terms of something like organic chemistry, or inorganic chemistry even, where it made sense to me, I was always good at it. But just math for math’s sake, no. So really biology and chemistry was where I thrived. And then when I got to undergrad, there was a lab there that had NASA funding to look at extremophile microorganisms, the things that maybe, you know, if there is life on Mars, those type of microbes that live in these really salty, dry, harsh conditions. And that professor that ran that lab saw my interest and said, come do a rotation in my lab, come see what it’s all about. That’s where I did my first DNA extraction, I was running my first PCRs, so that combination of having these growing things on a plate with using the molecular biology tools that I was already starting to be really interested in, it just kind of clicked for me. And so I really owe my undergraduate studies to that, to finding microbiology.

Quint
I have been looking at a couple of microscopes for myself, because I really want to start up the hobby of microbiology. As you know, YouTube and the internet has opened us up to being able to get any information we want and being able to see the world under the microscope. That’s just the coolest thing. So, a bit about the project you did about the DNA sequencing, how did you get it so pocket sized?

Sarah
The device was actually created by a company in the UK, Oxford Nanopore Technologies. So it was really getting in early with them, really trusting what they were doing, and seeing the development and the things that were coming, to where then, our creative aspect of that was- so normally my molecular laboratory has several big DNA sequencers, bigger than a microwave, that are very vibration sensitive, you can’t even run a vortex on the same bench. And then we also have other things to extract DNA, thermal cyclers that we use PCR reaction to amplify DNA, all these things are big, they’re heavy, they consume a lot of power. My folks that work for me, they’re all amazing, and they all have had years and years of training. So how do you take all of that, and put it in a way that you can send it to space, you can do it on the space station, and the astronauts can do it without any problem who have had no training. So our kind of thing was really was to develop that sample prep. It was great that the DNA sequencer Minion worked in flight, that was amazing, we did that test first. But even while we were testing that, getting ready to launch it for the first time, we already had astronauts who were actually living on the ocean floor at this habitat called NEEMO. They had already tested our whole swab-to-sequencer method before astronaut Kate Rubins even ran the first test of the Minion in flight. So we were already headed in that direction. And so using some of these great analogues, like that habitat on the ocean floor, really allowed us to test all these crazy different ways we could make the sample prep work. There’s a lot that needs to happen, right, to go from a swab to getting the DNA in a format that the sequencer will be able to read. So that’s what we developed. And we got it working through two rounds of NEEMO and a whole bunch of other ground testing. And we’ve now been doing it on board ISS since 2018.

Quint
And why is it so important for the astronauts to be able to do this DNA sequencing aboard the space station?

Sarah
That’s a really good question. So for me, from a microbiology standpoint, the way we do our risk assessment and say, how safe is the environment for the crew, we need to know the identity of those microbes. Just knowing that you cultured, and you can see some microbes on a petri dish, we expect that. There’s microbes everywhere around us, so that’s not surprising. But needing to know, are they the kind that could be a problem? Or are they the kind that we don’t worry about, that’s really the critical piece of information we know. And when you look at them on a plate, they all look the same, it’s impossible to tell what’s what. So how we’ve been doing that, and getting that critical information to be able to assess the risk of all these different systems is by returning those to the ground. So we’re telling the crew what was in the water they drank, in the air they were breathing, and on the surfaces they were living with, months after the fact. Right now it hasn’t been such a problem, because we have all these great- SpaceX and Orbital and all these folks that are, our Russian colleagues, who are routinely sending up cargo vehicles. So we can send up more disinfectant wipes, we can send up more antibiotics, we can send up a part to replace something on the water system if something’s being fouled up. We can do that pretty easily. Once we move away from ISS, we are going to lose those capabilities, we’re going to be much more dependent on what we take with us. So it’s going to be really important to know what is in the water. If there’s something growing on the wall, what is it? Do we leave it alone? Do we need to waste all of the disinfectant wipes? Same thing with antibiotics. Do we treat it? Is it just an acne type bacteria? Is it something worse? Those are the kind of questions we need to be able to address quickly once we lose this close proximity to earth and all these resupply vehicles that we have. That’s just from the microbiology standpoint. So I have colleagues that are also- when we first launched the sequencer, Dr. Aaron Burton, who is really interested in this technology from a life detection aspect. So the way that this sequencer works is different than the way any of the other traditional sequencers work. With the other sequencers, you’re usually detecting the fluorescence associated with that given DNA base. They fluoresce different colors, but we attach the fluorescent molecule then, and then we read that fluorescence to get the sequence. This works very differently. All we’re doing is detecting a change in current. Because of that you could really detect anything, right? It doesn’t have to be DNA or RNA as we know it on Earth, it could be something truly extra-terrestrial, which is exciting to think about. So we wouldn’t necessarily have a reference to know, okay, this is what this weird thing is, but we could detect it. So it’s a really exciting tool for the detection of potential other biomolecules beyond Earth. So that that in of itself, I think, is just really cool to think about. And anybody who’s doing research trying to understand how plants, animals, microbes, you name it, how they respond to spaceflight, this is a phenomenal tool to understand changes in gene expression and those basic questions that we still haven’t answered. We know every living thing responds to spaceflight, but we don’t really understand all the hows and the whys, looking at changes in the DNA, looking at changes in the RNA, looking at changes in the epigenome. Those are all things that can lead us to those understandings that are really important.

Quint
This is a big if, but if you were to find extra-terrestrial DNA, how would you know if it is dangerous or not?

Sarah
That again, excellent question. So if we were to find it, we could potentially use something like the Minion and some other tools to say yes, this is biological, this is life. If it has some type of nucleic acid that we’re familiar with, we know certain types of virulence factors or pathogenicity genes fall in different classes. And what we’ve learned based on life on Earth is those tend to all kind of look the same, so we could start to do an initial screen just to see if we see any homologues, to what we’re seeing, based on what we know of life on Earth. I think that our approach from a planetary protection aspect would be that- and this is going back to just micro kind of understanding- the things that have evolved to survive in those types of conditions, we would not expect to be able to infect a human. Looking at something like these extreme places on earth, the really salty, the high pressure, the high temperature, the low temperature, the things that have evolved to survive there are not dangerous to us because they would never be able to colonize and survive and do anything in our bodies. So that’s kind of our go-in approach is that we think that the risk would be really, really low. But we would obviously do all the testing to try to understand that. And one of the first things is to see, does this look like anything we’re familiar with on Earth? And then the next best thing would be obviously start to do a lot of testing.

Quint
I know that sterilization on the ISS isn’t really necessary, but there is a kind of microbiome which you can live with. If you go to visit other planets like Mars, and you need to get sterilized so that you figure out if you’ve brought it along, how does that go?

Sarah
So I think that that’s an excellent question. And that’s something- I cannot tell you how many meetings per week I’m in about this very topic right now. This is something that NASA, along with all of our international colleagues, are really starting to take a hard look at. I think that we’re going to try to do a couple things. It’s going to be impractical to really know every single thing that’s in the spacecraft microbiome. We can do a lot to try to establish a baseline. Whatever vehicle we’re going to Mars in, what is that vehicle, what does the microbiome look like? And then what we will look for is, are there any perturbations in that, do we see any spikes, is anything looking weird, to try to understand if we’ve brought something back in with us. And I think in the time between now and when we go to Mars, again, we’re never going to know every single little microbe and every DNA sequence that’s there, but we can have a pretty good idea. And that can help us rule out a lot of things we might potentially find on Mars. We’re getting ready to start an experiment onboard the ISS, hopefully in 2022 it’ll be happening, where we’re actually going to have the astronauts take these big swabs out on EVA–so outside the ISS–and swab vents and places that we think might be leaking microbes, vents that are venting from ISS. We’re also going to be looking at on the actual EVA suits, places that vent from those, to try to start to understand, okay, are we leaking microbes? What’s surviving? Are they spreading? Are they viable? Or are we just able to detect their DNA? Those are the types of questions we’re going to start asking. So I’m hopeful that all these studies will provide a lot of data that we can then use modeling and things like that to help us have better predictions at how much cleaning and/or sterilization is needed.

Quint
I don’t know how much you plan what the astronauts will be doing. The flight time to Mars is like eight, nine months, what will they be doing in that time?

Sarah
I think a lot of that will come out of what we learn going back to the Moon. So the plan is to have something called Gateway in orbit around the Moon. So you can think of Gateway as a smaller ISS that instead of orbiting Earth orbits the Moon, and you’re going to have kind of an Apollo scenario where you launch four crew members, and two stay at the Gateway and two go down to the Moon. The astronauts that stay on the Gateway, I think we can learn a lot about what they should be prepping and what they should be getting ready in kind of a simulated Mars situation. And at first the Gateway missions will be pretty short, 30 days, things like that. But then the idea is that they’ll ramp up and we’ll have people that live in them for longer time to get us ready for that Mars scenario. So I imagine it’ll be a lot of things like maintenance of their craft, keeping their vehicle safe is going to be a big part of it, maintenance is always something we do. Then they’re going to need some kind of exercise, that’s a definite requirement, because we’re going to expect them to be healthy enough to get out of that vehicle and walk on Mars after they’ve been in it for a long time, right. So we’re going to need to make sure they’re in good physical shape. So exercise. I’m sure there’ll be a lot of things that we do for their mental shape as well to keep them mentally happy and engaged. And I do think there’ll be some science, and whether that’s growing some plants, doing things like every few days collecting swabs and sequencing them to understand the microbiome, I think those will all be engaging and enriching things that are providing really valuable information and helping keep them busy and engaged. And I mean, the astronauts, they’re not all scientists, but they all love doing it so much, we’ve not yet met a crew member who just wasn’t so excited about the idea of doing DNA sequencing and knowing what those microbes were in near real time, they’ve all loved it. They all love growing and caring for the plants. And so I think that it’ll be really important for the folks at NASA who do figure out all those activities to take all that into account. And that is the kind of information that a lot of people don’t realize that we’re collecting on ISS right now.

Quint
This is something which saddens me a little bit, but there’s a bit of a negative climate around space and space exploration. Like if you type in the word space in Google, one of the first article plates that shows up is why space shuttle is a waste of money with one of the main arguments being, as we have so many problems still on Earth, why are we spending so much money on space? While percentage-wise it’s not that much, can you say a bit about why it is so important?

Sarah
Yeah, and I agree with you, it is really sad. And as we’ve seen more and more of these guys with a lot of money doing this space tourism thing, I think it’s even gotten a little more of a negative effect. I will say, what Elon Musk is doing with SpaceX is just incredible. I’ve been fortunate enough to work with them since kind of the beginning when they were getting their cargo vehicle online, and to see how quickly and how safely they’ve transitioned to fly our crew, and just how great that’s been. I can’t say enough good things about what SpaceX has done. And we’re really excited to see Boeing come online and potentially start launching our astronauts. And again, I know that that in and of itself probably doesn’t make a lot of people excited. But it does me, because it’s showing that it’s not just NASA anymore, there’s other avenues. So from a very simplistic point for me, it’s that human nature to need to explore, to want to explore. And for me, a small town kid from this little town in Kansas, and here I am in Houston, in my opinion doing really cool things, and it’s because of that excitement, that passion, that desire to explore. And I don’t know how many kids I can tell you that, like myself then, that I’ve seen follow the same path, and we’re doing these things today because NASA inspired us, Not just NASA, spaceflight, what our Russian colleagues did, and now what our ESA (European Space Agency) and JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) colleagues are doing, you know, it’s incredible. And so it’s just that desire to explore. And I feel like as a human race, the minute we stop exploring, and the minute we stop trying to advance technology and understanding and learning, it’s kind of like, what for? I feel like there’s so many questions. And I think NASA is trying to do a better job. And I think that’s something we’ll continue to do, to show how many things have come to benefit life on Earth because of the advances we’ve made in space, and because of the technologies we’ve developed in space, we’ve made life on Earth better for so many. And I will say that’s one of the mottos of the International Space Station, “In space for Earth.” We’re doing things there to come back and translate to Earth, that aren’t to benefit space. They’re to benefit people on Earth.

Quint
Indeed. If you have got this infinite sandbox, why just sit on one grain of sand?

Sarah
Yep.

Quint
What is the favorite space project of all time?

Sarah
Of course I’m biased with mine because I think it’s great that we can do complex molecular biology in space. But I also think, just kind of as a whole, all the plant growth that they’re doing. There’s several plant payloads, veggies, so many different aspects to look at crop production, plant growth in space. And I think that that’s going to be insanely critical for us going forward, how do we produce food and feed our astronauts, and what we didn’t expect was all the psychological benefits that the astronauts would get from that. So just that’s so cool that we do that now, that they’re growing things and eating them on board. That’s pretty cool.

Quint
You want to talk a bit more about edge computing? Why is it important, especially in space exploration, to use edge computing?

Sarah
As we work with something—again, in a context I understand, something like DNA—the data that we’re able to acquire is just so much more and so much bigger. Whether it’s imagery data, or DNA sequence data, we’re talking big data. Downlinking that data to Earth to be able to do something with it, make meaning of it, which is that’s the important thing you do with your data, as data gets bigger and bigger and bigger, that’s the challenge. And so if you’re able to take your data all the way from, you know, for us to go from the sample to the data generation to the answer, that’s the key part, right? We want to get to the answer. So having this capability on board ISS allows us to do that. Without having to send these massive data files back down to earth, we can have them processed onboard, again, reaching that near real-time. So it’s not real-time, but near real-time goal of being able to say, this is what was in the water, this is what was growing on the wall. This was what was infecting the crew member. Data are meaningless if you don’t have the tools to process them and understand them and make meaning. So for me, that’s the biggest thing that this has done. You know, we’ve been doing microbiology the same way since the beginning of ISS, which is sending plates back to Earth. That’s still what we were doing until this collaboration we’ve had with IBM and edge computing, we were having to send the data back to Earth. So being able to not be dependent on Earth is huge, right? Being able to get that true answer without having to wait for it to be sent down and process it on Earth is really a big game changer in all of this.

Quint
So it cuts down the latency by like a month or so.

Sarah
Exactly. You know, when it comes to something like space travel, NASA and SpaceX and our international colleagues, everybody has done such a good job at reducing risk. There’s always risk, and when something goes wrong, that’s when you don’t have the time to wait on an answer. You need that answer quickly.
.

Quint
Thanks again to Sarah for the interview. I really enjoyed her talking about her work and her insights on these space projects. Space is just so cool and let’s, like she said, fill that need for our human nature to explore by continuing these awesome projects.

We hope you enjoyed today’s segment. Please feel free to share your thoughts over social media and visit Longitude.site for the episode transcript. Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.