Atharv has received an academic year internship from the New Jersey Space Grant Consortium. In collaboration with Dr. Jessica Lee (Space Biosciences Research Branch of NASA Ames Research Center), Atharv aims to understand how microgravity during spaceflight affects nutrient cross-feeding and mutant dynamics in microbial ecosystems. Microbes are inevitably a part of human life in space, where they have the potential to cause disease but also mediate healthy bodily processes (e.g., digestion in the gut). They also may play important roles in biotechnology that humans will need for long-term survival beyond Earth, such as waste remediation, biomining, and food production. Microgravity may fundamentally change the availability of nutrients in a microbial culture by dramatically reducing density-driven convection, making the growth of microbes strongly limited by the diffusion of nutrients between cells. This will create strong evolutionary selection on mutations that enhance growth under those conditions, setting microbes in spaceflight on a very different evolutionary trajectory than what they would follow on Earth. The NJSGC will provide scholarship support directly to Atharv to pursue this project.
