A researcher at the University of British Columbia unveiled payloads of baker's yeast sent on a recent trip to the moon that could one day protect astronauts from cosmic radiation.
On Dec. 14, 1972, geologist Jack Schmitt packed 110 kilograms of rock into Apollo 17’s lunar lander. Mission Commander Eugene A. Cernan gazed out onto the pockmarked lunar surface and radioed back to mission control in Houston, Texas.
There’s just one problem: like the rest of life on Earth, humans have evolved with the magnetic protection produced by the planet's iron core. That magnetic field shields life from cosmic radiation — high-energy particles ejected from stars during the fusion process. “If you're on the moon for more than six months, you've now exceeded your lifetime dose of radiation,” said Corey Nislow, a cell biologist at the University of British Columbia.Two payloads come home On Dec. 11, 2022, Nislow remembers sitting at home watching TV for news of Artemis-1 and furiously texting his colleagues in Durham, North Carolina.
Baker’s yeast diverged from humans roughly a billion years ago, but its rapid life cycle and genetic makeup make it the perfect stand-in to test interventions to protect humans against cosmic radiation. Nislow says he was racked with anxiety after the spacecraft splashed down in the Pacific. The capsule along with the experiments inside had been shipped on a flat-bed truck from San Diego to the Kennedy Space Center.
It’s not yet clear which of the 6,000 mutant yeast strains were damaged and which survived the 25 days of cosmic radiation. Nislow and his team still need to sequence the yeast's DNA to detect which have been damaged where. In the case of the cosmic radiation, an mRNA countermeasure could act as a blueprint to ramp up the production of certain repair enzymes, Nislow says.
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