When the Artemis 1 mission blasts off Monday from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on its 42-day mission to circumnavigate the Moon, its Orion spacecraft will be uncrewed.One University of British Columbia scientist will be watching anxiously as his payload — an experiment containing 6,000 yeast strains — heads out into the black.
Eleven years ago, in 2011, when his yeast hitched a ride on the last space-shuttle mission, Nislow had a front-row seat for the launch. He’s not afraid to admit that when the engines roared — when his yeast began its journey to the International Space Station — he cried. Of important note is that we humans share 50 per cent of our DNA with yeast cells. So information gleaned from Nislow’s yeast is applicable to us, he says.To create his 6,000 mutant strains, Nislow and his team have snipped out one — and only one — gene sequence from the original strain and replaced it with a unique identifying sequence. Somewhat like a bar code. Six thousand times.
Knowing the profiles for the tens of thousands of drugs tested on his yeast, and knowing the functions of its various gene sequences, he can use the information he’s collected over the past two decades to indicate what might be the best drugs to begin trials on for treatment of, for example, COVID or monkeypox.
The short duration of their missions — about a week — meant the Apollo astronauts of the 1960s and ’70s weren’t much affected by that radiation, but those who will eventually be going to Mars will be out of the Earth’s magnetic protection for about a year.