Establishing Standard Protocols for Bacterial Culture in Biological Research in Canisters (BRIC) Hardware

The NASA GeneLab Data System (GLDS) was recently developed to facilitate cross-experiment comparisons in order to understand the response of microorganisms to the human spaceflight environment. However, prior spaceflight experiments were conducted using a wide variety different hardware, media, culture conditions, and procedures. Such confounding factors could potentially mask true differences in gene expression between spaceflight and ground control samples. In an attempt to mitigate such confounding factors, we describe here the development of a standardized set of hardware, media, and protocols for liquid cultivation of microbes in space, using the model bacteria Bacillus subtilis strain 168 and Staphylococcus aureus strain UAMS-1 and Biological Research in Canister (BRIC) spaceflight hardware.