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Seminar - Space mice in the area of gene technology

Welcome to our next open seminar held by Solene Frapard, which will talk about the work she and her colleagues are doing on space mice within the area of gene technology. 

Time: Tue 2023-05-30 15.15 - 16.00

Location: D2

Video link: https://kth-se.zoom.us/j/61902640478

Participating: Solene Frapard

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The coming years will witness the rise of commercial spaceflight and the launching of human missions to Mars. As a result, many humans of all ages will go into space for longer periods of time and will be more exposed to environmental stressors, such as radiation and microgravity. This is the context for the Rodent Missions, which were initiated by NASA in 2014 and consist of sending rodents to the International Space Station (ISS) for different durations and under different conditions.
Our focus here in the rodent missions RRRM-2, RR-10, and RR-3 will be to study the impact of these space stressors on mouse brains that stayed in the ISS compared to their controls left on Earth.
For this study we are using a cutting-edge technique called Spatial Transcriptomics (ST), developed in Sweden at SciLifeLab in 2016. This technique facilitates capturing information contained in cells in the form of RNA while maintaining the spatial localization of these cells in the tissue. ST is an exploratory technique that could help us understand what happens in different parts of the brain under stressors such as radiation and microgravity.
Preliminary studies have shown a possible similarity between the impact of space travel on the brain and certain degenerative diseases such as Parkinson's disease; this is a theory that we are working to confirm or refute through our ongoing work.