It’s a classic superhero tale: Inconspicuous, underestimated, our hero is revealed to have powers beyond imagination! The hottest and coldest environments on Earth, decades without water, the powerful radiation of space – none of it is any match for…the tardigrade!
This chubby, microscopic, eight-legged animal may be
an unlikely hero, but tardigrades, also known as water bears due to their shape
under a microscope, possess superpowers when it comes to surviving really harsh
conditions. Understanding how they tolerate extreme environments – including
the one astronauts experience in space, with microgravity and elevated
radiation levels – can better guide research into protecting humans from the
stresses of long-duration space travel. An experiment starting aboard the
International Space Station, called Cell Science-04, will help reveal how
tardigrades do it.
“We want to see what ‘tricks’ they use to survive when
they arrive in space, and, over time, what tricks their offspring are using,”
said Thomas Boothby, assistant professor at the University of Wyoming in
Laramie and principal investigator of the experiment. “Are they the same or do
they change across generations? We just don’t know what to expect.”
Credits: NASA/Ames
Research Center
One option in the tardigrade bag of tricks could be producing tons more
antioxidants to combat harmful changes in the body caused by increased
radiation exposure in space.
“We have seen them do this in response to radiation on Earth,” said
Boothby, “and we think the ways tardigrades have evolved to withstand extreme
environments on this planet may also be what protects them against the stresses
of spaceflight.”
The research team will look at what happens with tardigrade genes in space.
Knowing which ones are turned on or off in response to short-term and long-term
spaceflight will help researchers identify specific ways tardigrades use to
survive in this stressful environment. If one solution they have is to turn up
the dial on antioxidant production, for example, genes involved in that process
should be affected.
Checking which genes are also activated or deactivated by other stresses
will help pinpoint the genes that respond exclusively to spaceflight. Cell
Science-04 will then test which are truly required for tardigrade adaptation
and survival in this high-stress environment.
Data from the space station experiment will also offer a comparison for
Earth-based research. The latter is more common and less costly, and uses
simulated spaceflight conditions to study tardigrade responses. The current
experiment will tell researchers how similar those conditions are to actual
spaceflight.
The tiny heroes of Cell Science-04 won’t be the first spacefaring
tardigrades to join an astronaut crew. They have already been shown to survive
even the vacuum of space when exposed outside the space station for an
experiment. This time, they’ll be on board living and reproducing inside
special science hardware developed for the station by NASA’s Ames Research
Center in California’s Silicon Valley, which also manages the mission. Called
the Bioculture System, the hardware lets scientists carry out long-term studies
of cultures of cells, tissues, and microscopic animals in space by allowing
real-time, remote monitoring, and finer control over the conditions in which
they grow.
In the long run, revealing what makes tardigrades so tolerant could lead to
ways of protecting biological material, such as food and medicine from extreme
temperatures, drying out, and radiation exposure, which will be invaluable for
long-duration, deep-space exploration missions. That’s superhero-size potential
for the teeny tardigrade.
Dr. Boothby’s research is supported by NASA’s Biological and Physical Sciences
Division.
Date: Jun 3, 2021
Source: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/ames/microscopic-superheroes-to-help-protect-astronaut-health-in-space
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