Much like the human body, the space station environment causes stress to bacteria. In fact, astronauts become immunodeficient and show signs of accelerated aging while bacteria can become more virulent, compounding the negative effects of human health in space. The importance of understanding the altered response of bacteria in the microgravity will only grow as we send more humans to space. Understanding may also impact fluidic sterilization practices in microgravity as we dabble in pharmaceutical and other types of fabrication. The primary goal of this research is to develop a system to investigate the effects of microgravity on swimming bacteria. Specifically, we want to observe the differences in motility and phenotype. To observe motility in this case means to get 3-dimensional trajectory information. Motility is interesting from both a physical and biological standpoint. From a physics perspective, we may think of them as tiny motors that use rotation to propel themselves. While this is technically true, their reactions to changes in physics cannot be predicted by this crude model. For example, if we increase the viscosity of their environment, physics expects their speed to decrease with some correlation. In fact, bacteria have been found to increase in speed to a limit. Biologically, since changes in motility can be linked to virulence, there is a chance that there will also be observable related motility changes. We are using a custom common mode off-axis digital holographic microscope (DHM) developed for the ISS, called ELVIS, in order to visualize swimming bacteria in microgravity. ELVIS will be wired in to allow ground commanding from PSU. We are sending a selected bacterial strain, Colwellia.psychrerythrea, from earth in cell culture bags to the station where the astronauts will load them into enclosed sample slides and into ELVIS. Once the sample is in, we will send commands from earth to take periodic 30 second recordings over a couple hours. This will happen a total of 12 times. To perform genetic analysis, the astronauts will inject an RNA fixative into one of the cell culture bags brought back to earth frozen. This sample will stay frozen until brought back to PSU and we can perform RNA extraction and get it sequenced. We will also perform parallel experiments as controls for imaging and RNA sequencing, matching the timing with the on-board experiments.