Gut Microbiota Dynamics in a Confined Bio-regenerative Life Support System

During long-term manned space exploration, challenges exist both on the need for full autonomy, provision and reprocessing of resources and protection of crews from illness and infection. Bio-regenerative life support systems (BLSS) are artificially confined ecosystems to provide food, oxygen and other basic necessities for human living. Aggravated research has identified that gut microbiome can affect various human health both from psychological and physiological. Investigations are forced to study gut microbial alterations in a confined BLSS to maintain human physical and mental health and provide guidance in universal explorations. Here we performed metagenomics sequencing of 55 samples from two males and females who underwent a 60-day experiment in a confined BLSS, Chinese Lunar Palace 1, to study the effect of co-diet and cohabitation on host gut microbiome and the association between these kinds of changes and individual or sexual phenotypes.