2023-11-11 05:00:07
Space exploration has always posed intriguing questions and unique challenges. Among the many questions that arise, the possibility of life outside our planet is at the heart of much research. In 2021, Japanese scientists carried out a pioneering experiment by cultivating mouse embryos in space, aboard the Space Station (The International Space Station or ISS) is a habitat… (ISS). The results of this experiment might well have major implications for the future of spatial exploration and reproduction. for a theory of the teaching system is a work…) human in space.
Researchers at Yamanashi University, in collaboration with the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), set out to understand how embryos develop in microgravity (Microgravity, in the field of astronautics, is the state of a body such as all of…), an environment (The environment is everything that surrounds us. It is the set of natural elements and…) very different from the Earth. The experiment began with mouse embryos at the two-cell stage, frozen and sent aboard the rocket (Rocket may refer to:) SpaceX (SpaceX (or Space Exploration Technologies Corporation) is an American company…) to the ISS in August 2021. On board the station, the astronauts thawed the embryos and cultured them for four days (The day is the interval between sunrise and sunset; it is the …) in a specific environment, imitating the maximum duration of survival outside the uterus (The uterus is an organ participating in reproductive functions in mammals including…). The results of this experiment, published in the journal “iScience,” were astonishing.
The researchers found that the embryos developed normally into blastocysts, a preliminary step to implantation in the uterus. This discovery challenges previous hypotheses according to which terrestrial gravity plays an essential role in embryonic development. It appears that microgravity does not hinder the early stages of mammalian cell differentiation.
However, a particularity was observed during the experiment. Some of the blastocysts formed in microgravity showed ectopic expression of NANOG factor, essential for maintaining pluripotency of embryonic stem cells. This highlights the importance of further research to determine whether microgravity can induce other unexpected molecular or cellular changes.
The experiment paves the way for further research into how other biological processes might be affected by the absence of gravity. However, many challenges remain, including space radiation, which can damage DNA. In this study, no significant difference in DNA damage was observed between embryos grown on Earth and those from Earth. ‘ISS. However, it is necessary to reproduce these results to fully validate them.
The researchers’ next step will be to transplant the blastocysts grown in microgravity into mice to see if they can give birth to normal pups. This step might have crucial implications for future space exploration and space colonization missions.
With NASA planning to send humans back to the Moon as part of its Artemis program, in preparation for a trip to Mars in the late 2030s, the question of human reproduction in space is becoming increasingly relevant. . The experiment with mouse embryos grown in space might well be an important step towards realizing these dreams of interstellar exploration and colonization of distant planets.
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