ASGSB 1999 Annual Meeting Abstracts

NASA AMES COLLABORATES WITH BIOSERVE, INC. TO DEVELOP NEW TECHNOLOGY IN SUPPORT OF NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH. BIOLOGY.1 (NIH.B1) ON STS-93. D. Reiss-Bubenheim¹ and L.S. Stodiek². ¹NASA Ames Research Center (ARC), Life Sciences Division, Moffett Field, CA 94035 , and ²BioServe Space Technologies, Univ. of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309.

NASA Ames Research Center has collaborated with BioServe Space Technologies, a NASA-sponsored Commercial Space Center (CSC), to develop an enhancement to the Group Activation Package (GAP) and the Isothermal Containment Module (ICM) flown within the Commercial Generic BioProcessing Apparatus (CGBA) payload.  The collaboration evolved from the needs of both organizations to fly middeck experiments on the STS-93 mission.  By sharing resources, the Code UL-sponsored science investigation and the Code UM-sponsored commercial research were able to be manifested on the mission together. Both organization benefited from the collaboration by being able to provide more research capacity to the commercial and scientific investigators. Dr. Haig Keshishian’s whose experiment is entitled “Effects of Spaceflight on Drosophila Neural Development” will lead the science investigation.  This experiment will determine the effects of microgravity on a transgenic fruit fly line that expresses Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP) to visualize singly identified motoneurons and their muscle targets.

Critical developmental times of Drosophila embryos and larvae will be preserved during the 5-day STS-93 mission. The ICM will contain 8 GAPS containing 8 standard petri dishes with various stages of Drosophila development.  Each individual GAP will be temperature controlled automatically by thermal electric coolers (TECs) programmed to incubate (25 C) or cool (11.5 C) the fruit fly eggs and larvae at specific timepoints inflight. This will be the first flight of the new TEC/GAPs and ICM carrier. This hardware offers multi-chamber temperature control in a compact volume, which could provide added temperature treatments for other life sciences and commercial middeck experiments.

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