Born in space
We owe our existence to a journey into space. In the nineties the European Space Agency (ESA) commissioned our parent company Bioclear earth, to design a biological air filter for manned space stations. In this ‘living filter’, bacteria purify the air by transforming the pollution into recyclable substances (water and carbon dioxide).
But, every living system is exposed to the risk that, in addition to ‘’good’’ bacteria, ‘’bad’’ bacteria could grow, which could cause health risks for the astronauts. To detect the ‘’Bad guys’’ in time, our parent company Bioclear has developed a screening method based on DNA-analysis through which the crew could easily screen the filter. Back then; the analysis method we used was FISH. At that time, DNA-analysis was still at an early stage. Two foreign universities only applied FISH. The beauty of FISH is that we could make the pathogens visible under a fluorescence microscope by making them light up.