Gene Expression Variations During Drosophila Metamorphosis in Space. The GENE Experiment in the Spanish Cervantes Mission to the ISS

Abstract

The ISS expedition 8, a 10 days “taxi” flight Soyuz Mission to the International Space Station (ISS) to replace the two-member ISS crew, took place during October 2003. Within the Spanish Cervantes Scientific Mission, in this crew exchanging flight, some biological experiments were performed. The third member of the expedition, the Spanish born ESA astronaut Pedro Duque, returned with the Soyuz 7 capsule and the experiment containing transport box after 11 days on microgravity. In the GENE experiment, we intended to determine how microgravity affects the organism rebuilding processes that occurs during Drosophila metamorphosis. In addition to the ISS samples, some control experiments were performed including a 1g Ground control parallel to the ISS flight samples, a Random Position Machine microgravity si m u l a t e d c o n t r o l a n d a p a r a l l e l Hypergravity (10g) exposed samples experiment. We have used extracted RNA from these samples to test the differences among gene expression during Drosophila development with one of the current more powerful technology, a Drosophila complete genome microarray (version 1.0, AffymetrixTM). A preliminary analysis of the results indicates that around five hundred genes change their expression profiles being especially affected the mitochondrial ribosomal ones.