Another day of science yesterday here on humanity’s outpost in space!
First, you’ll be happy to hear that the BRICs I talked to you about in the last logbook are happily chilling out at -98deg Celsius in one of our MELFI freezers: after I activated the experiment on Monday, the microbial cultures remained at ambient temperature for about 24 hours and then it was time to put them in cold stowage, where they’ll remain until they can be returned to Earth.
Yesterday I also performed the third and last run of the Osteo-4 experiment, which came up on Dragon last week. It’s a set of three trays, each one hosting three bioreactors with a culture of mouse bone cells. The aim is to investigate the mechanism of mechano-transduction, which basically means that bones tissue “senses” mechanical forces and responds with a particular behavior. That’s probably why we lose mass in space: in weightlessness there isn’t much load on or skeleton, so the response of our body is to reduce bone mass. If we only could convince our body that we’ll go back to Earth within a few months and all that bone mass will come in handy! To try and send that message we put mechanical stress on our bones by working out every day on a machine, ARED, that simulates weightlifting.
Anyway, back to our experiment, the point is to study gene expression in osteocytes in microgravity: that’s because osteocytes, which are the most common cells in bone, are the mechanosensors of the bone; they are responsible for sensing mechanical loads and inducing appropriate biological responses. How this mechanism works, however, is still a bit of a mystery. Here comes Osteo-4 into play!
As for my contribution, my job was to remove the bioreactors from the trays they are installed in, to reconfigure the ducting to close all the loops and then put the bioreactors in cold stowage. What made it a bit more cumbersome than it otherwise would be is that, as you can see in the picture, I had to work in the disposable glovebox… my good old friend from the fruit flies experiment, remember?
Futura mission website (Italian): Avamposto42
avamposto42.esa.int
(Trad IT) Traduzione in italiano a cura di +AstronautiNEWS
qui: https://www.astronautinews.it/tag/logbook
(Trad FR) Traduction en français par +Anne Cpamoa ici: https://spacetux.org/cpamoa/category/traductions/logbook-samantha
(Trad ES) Tradducción en español por
+Carlos Lallana Borobio
https://laesteladegagarin.blogspot.com.es/search/label/SamLogBook
(Trad DE) Deutsch von https://www.logbuch-iss.de
23/04/2015