Results for “materials genomics” — Page 3

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Selection Factors for Space Crops

NASA is actively researching space crop production to determine its potential to contribute to food system security on long duration missions beyond Low Earth Orbit. Our near-term focus is on nutrient and variety supplementation of prepackaged food with fresh produce that requires little or no processing. The longer-term goal is caloric replacement to become less dependent on Earth, and this will require cultivation of staple crops, processing and cooking equipment, integration with spacecraft air, water, and power systems, and automation. There are numerous technology and knowledge gaps remaining for sustainable space crop production systems, but one high-impact area is in the development of crops specifically customized to meet the needs of controlled environment crop production, astronaut health and well-being, and space-unique environments. Modern crop breeding and genome engineering tools are allowing for rapid development of new genotypes with incredible specificity. Targeted aspects to optimize crops for space have been identified and characterized into five categories: plant growth and development, plant physiology, produce nutrition, produce organoleptic acceptability, and postharvest characteristics. Within each category there are several targets that further the development of crop production systems for spaceflight, such as crop size and harvest index, tolerance to specific environmental stresses, optimizing target nutrients that are low or degrade in the packaged diet, maintenance time requirements, and less indigestible structural material. NASA-funded PIs are already beginning to develop candidate crops, and spaceflight testing and validation of novel space crops is on the horizon. Crops developed for space also have the potential to benefit terrestrial controlled environment agriculture crop production systems. This research was supported by NASA’s Space Biology and Human Research Programs.

Space Crop Production↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Selection Factors for Space Crops

NASA is actively researching space crop production to determine its potential to contribute to food system security on long duration missions beyond Low Earth Orbit. Our near-term focus is on nutrient and variety supplementation of prepackaged food with fresh produce that requires little or no processing. The longer-term goal is caloric replacement to become less dependent on Earth, and this will require cultivation of staple crops, processing and cooking equipment, integration with spacecraft air, water, and power systems, and automation. There are numerous technology and knowledge gaps remaining for sustainable space crop production systems, but one high-impact area is in the development of crops specifically customized to meet the needs of controlled environment crop production, astronaut health and well-being, and space-unique environments. Modern crop breeding and genome engineering tools are allowing for rapid development of new genotypes with incredible specificity. Targeted aspects to optimize crops for space have been identified and characterized into five categories: plant growth and development, plant physiology, produce nutrition, produce organoleptic acceptability, and postharvest characteristics. Within each category there are several targets that further the development of crop production systems for spaceflight, such as crop size and harvest index, tolerance to specific environmental stresses, optimizing target nutrients that are low or degrade in the packaged diet, maintenance time requirements, and less indigestible structural material. NASA-funded PIs are already beginning to develop candidate crops, and spaceflight testing and validation of novel space crops is on the horizon. Crops developed for space also have the potential to benefit terrestrial controlled environment agriculture crop production systems. This research was supported by NASA’s Space Biology and Human Research Programs.

Space Crop Production↗

NASA NTRS2002

Plant adaptation to low atmospheric pressures: potential molecular responses

There is an increasing realization that it may be impossible to attain Earth normal atmospheric pressures in orbital, lunar, or Martian greenhouses, simply because the construction materials do not exist to meet the extraordinary constraints imposed by balancing high engineering requirements against high lift costs. This equation essentially dictates that NASA have in place the capability to grow plants at reduced atmospheric pressure. Yet current understanding of plant growth at low pressures is limited to just a few experiments and relatively rudimentary assessments of plant vigor and growth. The tools now exist, however, to make rapid progress toward understanding the fundamental nature of plant responses and adaptations to low pressures, and to develop strategies for mitigating detrimental effects by engineering the growth conditions or by engineering the plants themselves. The genomes of rice and the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana have recently been sequenced in their entirety, and public sector and commercial DNA chips are becoming available such that thousands of genes can be assayed at once. A fundamental understanding of plant responses and adaptation to low pressures can now be approached and translated into procedures and engineering considerations to enhance plant growth at low atmospheric pressures. In anticipation of such studies, we present here the background arguments supporting these contentions, as well as informed speculation about the kinds of molecular physiological responses that might be expected of plants in low-pressure environments.

NASA Discipline Plant Biology↗

NASA NTRS1997

The role of clinical pharmacology in molecular genetics

PROBLEM: Discovering the causes of unusual phenotypes in human subjects is an important aspect of patient-oriented research. MATERIAL: The tools of clinical pharmacology are uniquely useful in addressing these problems. PATIENTS, SUBJECTS, OR CASE HISTORIES: We evaluated a 42-year-old patient with lifelong orthostatic hypotension and ptosis of the eyelids. He underwent a series of biochemical, physiological, and pharmacological tests outlined in this article. RESULTS: These studies indicated that sympathetic innervation was intact but that the sympathetic neurotransmitter was dopamine rather than norepinephrine. These results demonstrated that dopamine-beta-hydroxylase deficiency underlies the clinical abnormalities of this patient. CONCLUSION: In selected individuals with unusual phenotypes, the techniques of clinical chemistry and clinical pharmacology can define the nature of the defect at almost the resolution of the human genome.

NASA Discipline Regulatory Physiology↗

NASA NTRS2023

Molecular Identification of Microbial Contaminants

Microorganisms can have significant impacts on the success of NASA’s missions, including the integrity of materials, the reliability of scientific results, and maintenance of crew health. Robust cleaning and sterilization protocols are currently in place in NASA facilities, but agency experts agree that microbial contamination is unavoidable and its impact on NASA’s missions and science must be minimized. Therefore, it is critical to understand: 1) what specific microorganisms are present, 2) how they may impact scientific objectives, and 3) how to select appropriate mitigation strategies. The Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) Planetary Protection (PP) microbiology lab historically relied solely upon enumeration of culturable microbial contamination associated with spacecraft materials or cleanrooms. However, this process is time consuming, many microbes cannot be cultured, and very few can be identified with any fidelity using NASA standard microbiological methods. The work described in this white paper includes the establishment of molecular identification capabilities at MSFC, including DNA isolation, amplification, purification, and Sanger sequencing. This capability will not only improve planetary protection efforts at MSFC (i.e. by identifying contaminating microorganisms in cleanrooms or on spacecraft) but also offers a service center-wide for the identification of contaminants that arise in other projects, processing locations, or during set up and roll out of spacecraft. This work also lays the foundation for higher throughput efforts to identify large populations of microbes across the lifetime of a project and serves as the starting point for future work into whole genome sequencing, non-culture based methods, or additional characterization studies. Ultimately, accurate identification informs appropriate mitigation strategies, increasing the chances of success for NASA’s missions and objectives.

C. D. Cassilly↗

NASA NTRS2001

Molecular motors and their functions in plants

Molecular motors that hydrolyze ATP and use the derived energy to generate force are involved in a variety of diverse cellular functions. Genetic, biochemical, and cellular localization data have implicated motors in a variety of functions such as vesicle and organelle transport, cytoskeleton dynamics, morphogenesis, polarized growth, cell movements, spindle formation, chromosome movement, nuclear fusion, and signal transduction. In non-plant systems three families of molecular motors (kinesins, dyneins, and myosins) have been well characterized. These motors use microtubules (in the case of kinesines and dyneins) or actin filaments (in the case of myosins) as tracks to transport cargo materials intracellularly. During the last decade tremendous progress has been made in understanding the structure and function of various motors in animals. These studies are yielding interesting insights into the functions of molecular motors and the origin of different families of motors. Furthermore, the paradigm that motors bind cargo and move along cytoskeletal tracks does not explain the functions of some of the motors. Relatively little is known about the molecular motors and their roles in plants. In recent years, by using biochemical, cell biological, molecular, and genetic approaches a few molecular motors have been isolated and characterized from plants. These studies indicate that some of the motors in plants have novel features and regulatory mechanisms. The role of molecular motors in plant cell division, cell expansion, cytoplasmic streaming, cell-to-cell communication, membrane trafficking, and morphogenesis is beginning to be understood. Analyses of the Arabidopsis genome sequence database (51% of genome) with conserved motor domains of kinesin and myosin families indicates the presence of a large number (about 40) of molecular motors and the functions of many of these motors remain to be discovered. It is likely that many more motors with novel regulatory mechanisms that perform plant-specific functions are yet to be discovered. Although the identification of motors in plants, especially in Arabidopsis, is progressing at a rapid pace because of the ongoing plant genome sequencing projects, only a few plant motors have been characterized in any detail. Elucidation of function and regulation of this multitude of motors in a given species is going to be a challenging and exciting area of research in plant cell biology. Structural features of some plant motors suggest calcium, through calmodulin, is likely to play a key role in regulating the function of both microtubule- and actin-based motors in plants.

Non-NASA Center↗

NASA NTRS2019

Nasa GeneLab Computomics Reveal Horizontal Gene Transfer on International Space Station Environmental Metagenomes

Prokaryotic lifeforms can be observed to demonstrate many keen adaptive advantages, perhaps facilitated by a nature simplistic relative to divergent domains of life. In particular, decompartmentalized gene expression facilitates adaptation by allowing free exchange of genetic material, albeit at the cost of increased susceptibility to genetic damage. Thus, these lifeforms must compensate by embracing diverse investment strategies in an attempt to “brute force” the evolvability equation through precipitous genesis, lean metabolic efficiency, and sheer population. This prokaryotic archetype also enables symbiotic relationships with secondary mobile genetic elements known as plasmids, which have been shown to drive evolution on rapid temporal scales through processes such as conjugation and transformation. This study attempts to decipher whether these mechanisms of horizontal gene transfer (HGT) are major factors in determining prokaryote fitness within a unique isolated environment, the International Space Station (ISS). The ISS Microbial Tracking (MT) project has generated a wealth of data concerning the successive reigns of microbial genera that appear to thrive amidst harsh conditions for life. Despite relatively higher doses of ionizing radiation as compared to Earth, complications associated with microgravity, and the anti-microbial mélange deployed, microbial life still persists in this environment. The NASA GeneLab serves as a data repository and analysis platform to enable researchers to access space flight factor related data. With the use of GeneLab’s modern computational suites (computomics), phylogenetic and functional genomic investigations of HGT events were conducted on the data generated from the MT-1 project. The putative data concerning the plasmid population (plasmidome) of the ISS was algorithmically derived and compared to those of habitats with similar environmental dynamics- such as living quarters and hospitals- to investigate whether these HGT elements may play crucial role(s) in shaping the microbiome of this closed habitat that serves as the only inhabited structure in space.

Bense, Nicholas↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Variational Asymptotic Homogenization of Finitely Deformed Viscoelastic-Viscoplastic Composites

The objective of this paper is to develop a constitutive model for finitely deformed viscoelastic-viscoplastic materials and a micromechanics approach to homogenizing composites consisting of such materials. The development of the constitutive model involves establishing a thermodynamic framework based on finite strain theory, developing a viscoelasticity and a viscoplasticity model based on the thermodynamic framework, developing a radial return algorithm based on a classic framework, and deriving a closed-from incremental constitutive relation in the spatial configuration. The development of the micromechanics approach involves pulling-back the above constitutive relation to the material configuration, formulating a variational statement with the resulting constitutive relation, discretizing variational statement in a finite-dimensional space, and solving the discretized variational statement using an Euler–Newton predictor–corrector method. The constitutive model is calibrated via monotonic uniaxial compression tests on a polymer, and the calibrated model is validated by comparing its predictions with the cyclic test data. It is shown capable of characterizing viscoelasticity, viscoplasticity, and complex loading paths. The micromechanics approach’s capabilities are demonstrated through homogenizing a unidirectional fiber-reinforced composite, subjected to uniaxial, biaxial, and shear loading, at different strain rates. It is demonstrated to be capable of handling rate dependence and complex loading paths. The present framework can be further improved by implementing more sophisticated viscoelasticity and viscoplasticity models in future work.

Finite element analysis↗