CoSMOSMiTE - Comprehensive Screening of Metabolites in Organisms on Space Missions for Technological Exploration

Project description

Exploring life beyond Earth raises crucial questions about food production and how organisms' metabolism changes over their lifespan in extraterrestrial environments. Plants, essential for providing food and oxygen, play a key role, and understanding how complex organisms adapt to space conditions is also critical. In this context, model organisms like Caenorhabditis elegans and Arabidopsis thaliana serve as tools to study physiological and metabolic adaptations to spaceflight. In CoSMOSMiTE, we will use high throughput mass spectrometry-based metabolomics to analyze samples from these organisms aboard the International Space Station (ISS), providing insights into food production and sustaining life beyond Earth.

The CoSMOSMiTE project is a spin-off idea from a collaborative initiative of researchers from Tohoku University (Japan) and Örebro University. The biological experiments at ISS, coordinated by Prof Atsushi Higashitani and Prof Jun Hidema, are being conducted at Kibo, the Japanese Experiment Module at ISS. Upon return to Earth, samples will be sent to Tohoku University for morphological and genetic analysis, and further to Örebro University for metabolomics analysis.