ASGSB 1998 Annual Meeting Abstracts

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GROUND BASED FACILITIES FOR LONG TERM MICROGRAVITY RESEARCH.   J.P. Veldhuijzen¹, J.J.W.A. van Loon², J. Kiss³, C. Wood³, H.vd Ende⁴, and A. Guntemann⁵. ¹Dept. Oral Cell Biology & ²Dutch Experiment Support Center (DESC), ACTA / Vrije Univ., Amsterdam, The Netherlands; ³Dept. Botany, Miami Univ., Oxford OH; ⁴Dept. Molec. Plant Physiology. Univ. of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; ⁵Dept. Exp. Orthop.& Biomechan., Phillipps Univ., Marburg, Germany.

In the last decades many experiments using different biological systems studied effects of microgravity and find the cellular mechanisms leading to the biological response. Unfortunately many ex-periments could not be repeated due to limited flight opportunities and associated high costs for the actual space experiment. Also in view of reduced flight opportunities prior to the ISS-utilization, the development and utilization of cheap and readily available ground based experiment tools for si-mulated (or real) microgravity and hypergravity will be necessary.

Recently a new Random Positioning Machine (RPM), that generates simulated microgravity, became available. Preliminary experiments with developing Arabidopsis showed comparable effects as under space flight conditions (3). Experiments with isolated fetal mouse long bones are just started (1). In the future the RPM will be prepared for threshold studies between 0 and 1xg. The Free Fall Machine (FFM), which generates short but constantly repeated periods of real microgravity, is in use for some time already. Experiments with Chlamydomonas showed comparable results in cell cycle changes and cell morphology as found during BION-missions (4). To broaden the scope for acceleration studies a Tissue Culture Centrifuge (Midi-CAR) is available which can generate accelerations up to 100xg and allows culture in tissue culture plates and standard flight HW. The centrifuge was successfully used to study launch effects (TEXUS g-profiles) on cultures of bone forming osteoblasts (5). These ground based facilities may help efficiently to clarify the cellular mechanisms leading to the biological response to microgravity.

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