See Why NASA Is Sending Worms To Space

NASA is prepared to send thousands of microscopic worms to the International Space Station (ISS) aboard the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

The launch, which already took place at NASA Kennedy Space Center on December 4, isn’t the only one NASA has to worry about. Their mission is dependent on a Soyuz rocket successfully carrying three crew members to the ISS the day before.

The cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko (Russia), and astronauts Anne McClain (US), and David Saint-Jacques (Canada) will help run the science experiments on the ISS once in space.

NASA is hoping the worms can help uncover more about muscle loss in astronauts during spaceflight. Astronauts can lose up to 40 percent of their muscle mass during a long-term mission, resulting in significant reductions in strength and physical capacity.

Indeed, a loss of strength of 40 percent is roughly equivalent to the change in strength that comes from aging from 40 to 80 years on Earth. The muscle loss phenomenon is, therefore, a significant obstacle for long-term exploratory spaceflight, such as missions to Mars.

Exercise physiology research in the context of spaceflight was first conducted during the NASA Apollo and Skylab missions during the 1960 and 1970s. But despite over five decades of research in space, there are no countermeasures that can successfully prevent the negative effects of spaceflight.

Exercise does go some way to slow the rates of loss, however. To try and counteract muscle and bone loss, as well as detrimental effects on the heart and blood vessels, astronauts currently complete around two and a half hours of exercise each day.

Molecular approach

NASA will fly their worms to the ISS in specialized plastic bags with their food, where they will live in an incubator for six and a half days. They will then be frozen in the ISS’s freezer MELFI to prevent any further changes to the worms.

The worms will return to Earth in early 2019 where they will splash down into the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Los Angeles. NASA will then collect them and begin a program of extensive analysis.

Specifically, NASA's aim is to discover the molecular mechanisms of why muscle wastes away in spaceflight. The microscopic worms that they are using to achieve this are called C. eand are around 1mm in length.

These worms have body wall muscles that are very similar to human skeletal muscle(one of three major muscle types, typically attached to bones) in both structure and function.

Previous spaceflight experiments have shown that about 150 muscle genes are expressed less during spaceflight than they are on Earth.

This includes important clusters of genes involved in movement and muscle architecture, specifically the components of something called the “muscle attachment complex” – which determines how muscles are assembled and contract.

NASA will, therefore, investigate changes in this complex. Some of the samples collected will be treated with drugs that, on Earth, can modify the function of this complex and test if drugs can prevent muscle loss in space.

Spaceflight is considered a model of accelerated aging and our rate of aging is linked to “insulin signaling” – how insulin increases the uptake of glucose into fat and muscle cells. As we get older, the body gets less efficient at metabolizing glucose.

NASA wants to understand how spaceflight affects this process, they could use targeted interventions such as drugs to slow or prevent muscle atrophy in spaceflight. To test this out, they will use mutant worms that have a high or low uptake of glucose into their muscle cells and determine how their muscles are affected by spaceflight.

They also have a sub-team of researchers that will investigate the changes in motor neurons during spaceflight and how this affects muscle. Another will look at changes in the health and stress of neurons and determine whether there’s a particular mechanism that can help maintain it.

Collectively, the research will lead to the most comprehensive study of muscle loss in space ever conducted. It is also the first ever UK-led experiment on board the ISS and paves the way for future missions that have recently been announced by the UK Space Agency for 2021 onwards.