Adaptation of Streptococcus mutans to simulate microgravity

This work is an evolutionary experiment on adaptation to microgravity in Streptococcus mutans DSM 20523 over 100-days and utilized shotgun sequencing. Microgravity was determined to be a weakly selecting environment, although with the use of both an ancestral, normal gravity controls and sequencing at multiple time points we did find that there are a number of genomic adaptations that occur in a select few genes. Novel phenotypes also show that there is substantial variance between the populations indicating the importance of biological replicates in these types of experiments.