Yes / Background: Understanding and countering the well-established negative health consequences of spaceflight remains a primary challenge preventing safe deep space exploration. Targeted/personalized therapeutics are at the forefront of space medicine strategies, and cross-species molecular signatures now define the 'typical' spaceflight response. However, a lack of direct genotype-phenotype associations currently limits the robustness and, therefore, the therapeutic utility of putative mechanisms underpinning pathological changes in flight. Methods: We employed the worm Caenorhabditis elegans as a validated model of space biology, combined with 'NemaFlex-S' microfluidic devices for assessing animal strength production as one of the most reproducible physiological responses to spaceflight. Wild-type and dys-1 (BZ33) strains (a Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) model for comparing predisposed muscle weak animals) were cultured on the International Space Station in chemically defined media before loading second-generation gravid adults into NemaFlex-S devices to assess individual animal strength. These same cultures were then frozen on orbit before returning to Earth for next-generation sequencing transcriptomic analysis. Results: Neuromuscular strength was lower in flight versus ground controls (16.6% decline, p
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BRADFORD/oai:bradscholars.brad.ac.uk:10454/19712 |
| Date | 22 November 2023 |
| Source Sets | Bradford Scholars |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Article, Published version |
| Rights | (c) 2023 The Authors. This is an Open Access article distributed under the Creative Commons CC-BY license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), CC-BY |
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