Research review paperToward biotechnology in space: High-throughput instruments for in situ biological research beyond Earth
Introduction
Biotechnology is a major scientific, technological and economic driver that holds promise not only to change permanently our lives on the Earth, but also to advance, and perhaps even facilitate, long-term human exploration of space. To apply biotechnology in space we have to meet a number of challenges, both scientific and technical, not encountered in terrestrial setting. Terrestrial organisms away from Earth confront hostile environments characterized by multiple stresses. Some of these stresses, such as markedly reduced gravity or energetic, charged particles are unfamiliar, nearly impossible to protect against and unreliably reproduced on the ground. Other, such as very low pressures, temperature variations, high levels of UV radiation, desiccation or nutritional deprivation, although encountered in some terrestrial ecosystems, are often more extreme in space. To survive and thrive in space, living systems must cope with all these stress factors simultaneously. To what extent and how they are able to do so are central questions in space biology research. These questions are both profound and difficult to answer because they involve a combination of desired biological traits that mostly have not been a subject of natural selection on the Earth. Therefore, clues to engineering or reinforcing them that can be obtained from modern organisms or evolutionary studies are only very limited. Progress in this area is inextricably connected with our ability to explore space permanently and safely.
To control effects of space-related stressors on living systems one needs to understand how these stressors impact organisms at the cellular and molecular level. In the half-century of space exploration, multiple lines of evidence have accumulated to state with near-certainty that effects of space environments are not limited to a small number of genes or a single subcellular component, but instead influence many gene products and cell functions (Cervantes and Hong, 2016, Fernandez-Gonzalo et al., 2017, Foster et al., 2014, Najrana and Sanchez-Esteban, 2016, Taylor, 2015). These diverse effects can be understood only by taking a global, integrative approach that parallels an approach used to deal with consequences of terrestrial stresses, such as environmental pressures or states of disease (Buescher and Driggers, 2016, Jozefczuk et al., 2010, Nielsen, 2017). The approach relies heavily on developing, cost-effective techniques for monitoring the identity and activity of genes, proteins and metabolites in organisms or their consortia, and interpreting them in terms of global, complex interactions within biological systems (Mousavian et al., 2015, Pulido et al., 2015). These techniques belong respectively to research areas of genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics, collectively known as “omics”. Even though “omics” approaches are relatively new, they have already produced many important insights to biology and medicine (Egea et al., 2014, Li et al., 2016, Schmidt and Goodwin, 2013).
This review is focused on high-throughput instruments of “omics” that hold potential to advance qualitatively research in space biology. Even though such instruments are indispensable for basic science and biotechnology they have not been yet permanently used in spaceflight. In large part, this is because deploying “omics” tools onboard spacecraft, even those that are based on mature technologies, such as Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) and measurements of gene expression, poses significant technical difficulties and might require substantial reengineering of their ground-based counterparts. The purpose of such effort is to meet the needs for miniaturization, automation, compatibility of protocols and materials with spacecraft or space habitats, reliability in the absence of gravity, and, at least in some cases, ruggedness and low power. This might appear to be a complex, time consuming and costly task. However, as we will argue in this review, with sufficient programmatic commitment and leveraging commercial partnerships, this task can be accomplished at reasonable costs in the next 2–3 years.
In the next section, we briefly discuss selected space biology research that has benefitted or will benefit from the application of “omics” tools. Subsequently, we review high-throughput ‘omics” technologies. We focus on information that these technologies provide, their advantages and disadvantages, and potential adaptations that might be required for space applications. This section may be particularly useful to experts in space exploration who are interested in the potential of biotechnology to advance this endeavor. Next, on-going efforts to develop flight instruments capable of carrying out “omics” measurements are described in detail. Since these instruments are not stand-alone devices, we also discuss supplementary capabilities needed to create “biological laboratories in space”. We close with conclusions and outlook for future investigations. In particular, we discuss why and under what circumstances “omics” analysis should be carried out in situ rather than post-flight in ground based laboratories.
Section snippets
Biological research in space
Biological research in space has a long history, the full account of which is beyond the scope of this review (Barratt and Baker, 2017, Nickerson et al., 2016, Nicogossian et al., 2016). However, in order to appreciate the type of investigations that are currently being conducted in space, it is important to review briefly the uniqueness of the space environment and how it impacts biological systems. Subsequently, we include here a few representative examples of studies that are closely related
High-throughput omics technologies for space applications
High-throughput, “omics” technologies for analysis of biological samples at the genomic, transcriptional, translational, and metabolic level would leverage our understanding of (a) behavior, in particular metabolism and regulation (including development), (b) genetic adaptations, and (c) identification of microorganisms in space. In this section, we briefly review the conceptual basis of these technologies and assess current abilities to adapt them for spaceflight in a relatively short period
High-throughput instruments in space
In the previous section, we briefly reviewed different omics technologies with the emphasis on both potential and challenges associated with their application in space research. In this section, we discuss how these challenges are being met in instruments that have been deployed or are being considered for deployment in space. These instruments are being developed with a broad range of goals in mind and differ markedly in their capabilities and technology readiness level. They are aimed at
Paradigms for biological research in space
For many years, space biology research relied on post-flight data analyses. This model has proven to be of only limited utility. Its shortcomings have been well documented. Due to constraints imposed by the model, quantity and quality of experiments suffered for a number of reasons, such as long waiting times between consecutive experiments, insufficient number of technical and biological replicates, problems with sample integrity and dissatisfaction of many biologists with the slow pace of
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Dr. David J Smith for his comments on the manuscript. This work was supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Astrobiology Science and Technology Instrument Development, the NASA Astrobiology Program and the Office of Chief Technologist NASA Ames Research Center.
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