GENE EXPRESSION VARIATIONS DURING DROSOPHILA METAMORPHOSIS IN SPACETHE GENE EXPERIMENT IN THE SPANISH CERVANTES MISSION TO THE ISS

摘要

The ISS expedition 8, a Soyuz Mission, flew to thernInternational Space Station (ISS) to replace the twomemberrnISS crew during October 2003. During this crewrnexchanging flight, the Spanish Cervantes ScientificrnMission took place. In it some biological experiments werernperformed among them three proposed by our Team. Thernthird member of the expedition, the Spanish born ESArnastronaut Pedro Duque, returned within the Soyuz 7rncapsule carrying the experiment containing transport boxrnafter almost 11 days in microgravity. In one of the threernexperiments, the GENE experiment, we intended torndetermine how microgravity affects the gene expressionrnpattern of Drosophila with one of the current morernpowerful technologies, a complete Drosophilarnmelanogaster genome microarray (Affymetrix?, versionrn1.0). Due to the constrains in the current ISS experiments,rnwe decided to limit our experiment to the organismrnrebuilding processes that occurs during Drosophilarnmetamorphosis. In addition to the ISS samples, severalrncontrol experiments have been performed including a 1grnGround control parallel to the ISS flight samples, arnRandom Position Machine microgravity simulated controlrnand a parallel Hypergravity (10g) experiment. ExtractedrnRNA from the samples was used to test the differences inrngene expression during Drosophila development. Arnpreliminary analysis of the results indicates that aroundrnfive hundred genes change their expression profiles, manyrnof them belonging to particular ontology classificationrngroups.