Mentor: Lauren Liddell
Description: As we plan crewed missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond, it?s essential to understand how persistent exposure to space radiation affects biology. Unlike on the International Space Station (ISS), where crew support and sample return are possible, experiments for long-duration missions require autonomous systems without sample return.
NASA's BioSentinel mission will launch in 2022. NASA?s latest biological CubeSat will send the budding yeast, Sacchyromyces cerevisiae, into deep space beyond low Earth orbit (LEO). Data from BioSentinel will be sent by telemetry back to Earth. While human cells would be ideal, limitations in culture methods, extended prelaunch storage, and long flight durations make it difficult to keep them alive. Unlike other model systems, yeast can survive the constraints of long-duration spaceflight. Despite a billion years of evolution separating yeast from humans, we share homology in hundreds of genes important for basic cell function, including responses to DNA damage. BioSentinel uses the redox dye alamarBlue as an indicator of the impacts of radiation on yeast. alamarBlue can only detect general changes to metabolism and growth and cannot detect specific molecular pathways triggered by space radiation.
The student will use prior and new experimental data to investigate potential molecular mechanisms and metabolic pathways influencing the alamarBlue assay (i.e. stress response, reactive oxygen species, changes in metabolic uptake) to inform future missions beyond LEO. The data analysis /research will also support the development of methods for future analyses.