A team of researchers led by scientists at Penn State examined fruit flies raised aboard the International Space Station (ISS) for a decade to understand spaceflight's effects on their immune systems, revealing some potentially severe impacts of prolonged space travel on astronauts.

Published in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology, the findings indicate space radiation and microgravity disrupt essential immune response pathways to fungal pathogens—a particular concern in the enclosed environmental systems astronauts inhabit during spaceflight and after landing on other planetary bodies.