Last day of training at the Japanese Space Agency JAXA for me and Terry. Among many other things, we were trained on the Protein Crystallization Research Facility (PCRF) in the JEM laboratory.
The purpose of the PCRF is to take advantage of the microgravity conditions on ISS to produce large, high-quality protein crystals, that are then returned to Earth for x-ray diffraction analysis.
Unless you’re familiar with the topic, you’re probably wondering why we care about protein crystals. I certainly did, before it was explained to me today. So, here’s what I understood.
We care a lot about proteins. Everything that happens in our body is regulated by proteins – about 100.000 different ones, continuously assembled in our cells according to the instructions coded in our genes. So, when researchers on Earth try to develop a drug that will cure a certain disease, one approach is to find out what relevant proteins are involved and how they function: drugs can then be developed that specifically target those proteins.
The good thing about proteins is that their function and their structure are closely related: figure out their structure and you’ll have learned a lot about their function. The other good thing about proteins is that we know how to make them grow into a crystal structure, in other words into a highly ordered arrangement of molecules. And the next good thing is that we have a great technique, X-ray diffraction, to analyze the structure of those crystals.
Now bring the ISS into the equation, a facility that provides long-term exposure to microgravity conditions. The protein crystals we can grow on ISS are larger and better quality than crystals that can be grown on the ground: subsequent X-ray diffraction analysis yields a much better understanding of the protein structure. Again, know the structure, know the function – which in turn is the necessary step to develop new drugs to cure disease.
In the picture (Credit: ESA/Corvaja) you can see us working on the PCGF training model.
(Trad IT) Traduzione in italiano a cura di +AstronautiNEWS qui:
https://www.astronautinews.it/tag/logbook/
(Trad ES) Tradducción en español aquí:
https://www.intervidia.com/category/bitacora/
(Trad FR) Traduction en français par +Anne Cpamoa ici:
https://spacetux.org/cpamoa/category/traductions/logbook-samantha/
04/03/2014