Squid Game: How UF leads the way with its Space Life Sciences Lab

Jamie Foster has spent her career trying to understand how our microbiome — the bacteria, fungi and viruses that naturally live on and in our bodies — impacts health, and how space impacts the microbiome.

“The microbiome is essentially telling your body what to do at the molecular level,” Foster says. “Sometimes a bacterial signal in one part of your body, say the digestive system, can promote your health, but change the context of that signal and move it to the heart or the bloodstream, and it could potentially cause damage or disease.”

Foster uses a unique symbiotic relationship between the tiny bobtail squid and a bioluminescent bacteria called Vibrio fischeri as a model for understanding microbial interactions.

“What makes this squid so unique is that it’s born with a special light organ, and as Vibrio fischeri colonizes the squid it allows the squid to glow in the dark,” Foster says. “Since Vibrio fischeri is the only bacterium that interacts with the squid, we can control how we put the animals and the bacteria together. So, instead of trying to understand thousands of different bacterial species interacting, in this squid there’s just one host and one bacteria, and they glow, so that makes the interactions much easier to follow.”

After years of developing and testing microgravity experiments using the squid in her lab, in 2021 Foster sent a NASA-funded experiment to the International Space Station called UMAMI for Understanding of Microgravity on Animal-Microbe Interactions.

“We sent the squid to space without any microbes at all, then colonized half of the animals with the Vibrio fischeri to see how that conversation initiated and unfurled in the space environment,” Foster says. “When the animals got to space, they were all showing signs of stress. But, the animals that received their microbes had their stress levels decrease almost completely after about 12 hours. In the animals that never received their microbes, their stress levels stayed high.”

The experiment provides insights into how the space environment affects the communication between animals and microbes, Foster says. It also could have important implications for long-term space travel, where astronauts will be living in a microgravity environment for extended periods.

“Microbes could play a crucial role in helping astronauts cope with the stresses of space travel,” she says. “It also contributes to our understanding of how microbes interact with their hosts in different environments, which could have applications in various fields, including medicine and agriculture.”