In the Spotlight:
The 2022 Annual Highlights of Results from the International Space Station is now available. Read about the pioneering discoveries made in life and physical sciences, human health, and new technologies developed in the zero-G laboratory orbiting Earth.
This issue features stories of key space biology accomplishments, including Microbial Tracking-1 mission findings and proof-of-concept on-orbit gene sampling.
Biological and Physical Sciences Bids Farewell to Retiring Division Director
 At the end of January, Dr. Craig Kundrot retired from a 25-year long career at NASA, where he finished as the Division Director of the Biological and Physical Sciences Division in the Science Mission Directorate. His passion for NASA science, enthusiasm, and visionary leadership have set a course for a bright future for life sciences in space. Learn about his career path in science in his own words.
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 Spaceflight News
Tomatoes in Space Experiment begins Operations on ISS in January
This series of space missions is a phased research project that examines growing plants to provide fresh food and enhance the overall living experience for crew members on future long-duration missions. It includes Veg-05, an investigation that uses the station’s Veggie facility to grow dwarf tomatoes and examine fruit production, microbial food safety, nutritional value, taste acceptability by the crew, and overall behavioral health benefits. Hardware for the investigation, essentially a miniature greenhouse, could be adapted for horticultural therapy and to provide fresh produce for those without access to a yard on Earth. During the week of January 9, crew members tended to and monitored the plants.
 The Plant Habitat-03 spaceflight experiment is assessing whether epigenetic adaptations in one generation of plants grown in space can transfer to the next generation. This 91-day experiment will grow the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana (mouse ear cress) until the plants produce seeds then the seed pods and plant tissues will be harvested and returned to Earth. Results could provide insight into how to grow repeated generations of crops to provide food and other services on future space missions.
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 New Discoveries
3D Printed Compact Imaging Platform Validated for Space Research with C. elegans
 In this newly published article, Dr. Siva Vanapalli of Texas Tech University reports on the testing and performance of a 3D printed compact imaging platform (CIP) that is integrated with a smart-device camera for the whole-organism phenotyping of the model nematode worm C. elegans.
The CIP has no external optical elements and does not require mechanical focusing, simplifying the optical configuration. The small footprint of the system powered with a standard USB provides capabilities ranging from plug-and-play, to parallel operation, and to housing it in incubators for temperature control.
Dr. Vanapalli and his team demonstrates the compatibility of the CIP with different C. elegans substrates, including agar plates, liquid droplets on glass slides and microfluidic chips. The system has been validated with behavioral and thrashing assays and shows that the phenotypic readouts are in good agreement with the literature data. A pilot study was conducted using mutant strains of C. elegans, which shows that the phenotypic data collected from the CIP successfully distinguishes these mutants. Results from this study demonstrate the compactness, portability and ease-of-use makes the CIP desirable for research and educational outreach applications on Earth and in space.
The model organism Caenorhabditis elegans is used in a variety of applications ranging from fundamental biological studies, to drug screening, to disease modeling, and to space-biology investigations. These applications rely on conducting whole-organism phenotypic assays involving animal behavior and locomotion. The simplicity and versatility offered by the compact imaging platform tested in this study makes it amenable to future C. elegans investigations on the International Space Station, where science experiments are constrained by system size, payload weight and crew time. The article is available online.
 This study was funded by Space Biology grant, "Determining Muscle Strength in Space-Flown Caenorhabditis elegans" to Dr. Siva Vanapalli of Texas Tech University. Dr. Vanapalli is a professor in the Chemical Engineering Department where he studies microfluidics, fluid mechanics of drops, polymer solutions and cells, tumor cell mechanics and cancer diagnostics, devices for drug screening and for C. elegans biology.
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Events & Opportunities
GeneLab for High Schools Now Accepting Applications for Summer 2023
 GeneLab for High Schools is now accepting student and teacher applications for our summer 2023 program! Fifteen students and three teachers will be selected to participate in this year's virtual program. Program dates are from July 17 through August 11, 2023. Here is the Teacher Application | Here is the Student Application. The deadline to apply is March 20, 2023.
For more information about the program visit our website. For updates about the program subscribe to our mailing list here.
You Still Have Time to Submit a Proposal!!!
 Space Biology research funding opportunity is still accepting proposals for plant, animal and microbial studies using exposure to lunar regolith simulant formulated to resemble material found in the Lunar Highlands at the Moon’s south pole.
Step 1 proposals are due February 15, 2023 and Step 2 proposals are due May 10, 2023. Visit the solicitation announcement on NASA's NSPIRES system.
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2023 Summer Space Life Sciences Training Program
Application Now Open!
 NASA's Ames Research Center Space Life Sciences Training Program (SLSTP) is accepting applications for the 2023 summer program. We're excited that we will be holding this year's program in-person at Ames Research Center, which will run June 5 through August 11, 2023 (10 weeks). The online application is available in the NASA STEM portal. You'll also find a complete list of this year's projects on the SLSTP website here. If you're an SLSTP alumni and are interested in being an SLSTP Staffer this summer, then you'll need to apply through the same NASA STEM Portal. The deadline to apply is March 1, 2023.
For more information about the SLSTP program visit our website. For updates about the program subscribe to our mailing list here.
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 Funding Resources for Prospective Researchers
Are you a researcher and wondering where you can find funding opportunities to enable your research to be flown to the orbiting laboratory? There are several sources of funding available to scientists to be used for research and development, payload development, payload processing at NASA facilities, on-orbit operation, and more. Visit this link for a guide to online funding information for space station research.
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Biospecimen Sharing Program
Share | Research | Discover
Rodent Research-18 (RR-18) ISS-Frozen Biospecimen Sharing Program Dissections are Complete!
 The RR-18 study, led by Dr. Vivien Mao from Loma Linda University, focuses on evaluating the mechanisms of response and remodeling in the eyes after exposure to space hazards. The mice were launched on SpaceX-24 in December 2021 and a subset of the mice were frozen on orbit and returned to Earth on SpaceX-25 in August 2022. The Space Biology Biospecimen Sharing Program (BSP) dissections of the RR-18 ISS-frozen experimental group were successfully completed at Loma Linda University, CA from October 24 – October 31, 2022. The BSP Team collected over 400 vials of tissues not utilized by the RR-18 study and turned over the samples to the NASA Biological Institutional Scientific Collection (NBISC) at the end of the dissections. The tissues will be available for request on the Life Sciences Data Archive (LSDA) biospecimen portal soon!
After nearly a year since the experiment launched, the dissections for RR-18 are complete.
For more information on BSP, please click here.
Check out NBISC to learn more about NBISC and how to request these biospecimens.
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