Think about a muscle as one thing that has spent your total life in dialog with gravity, consistently sensing your physique’s weight, consistently adjusting, consistently being informed it’s wanted. Now think about slicing that dialog off fully. That’s in some methods what occurs to an astronaut’s physique in orbit, and it’s the downside on the coronary heart of recent analysis at Iowa State College, supported by Iowa NASA EPSCoR, into how spaceflight reshapes human physiology from the mobile stage upward.
The Worldwide Area Station, the place the muscle losing studied by Dr Kamal’s workforce performs out in orbit, a problem that grows as missions push on in the direction of the Moon and Mars (Credit score: NASA)
The work belongs to Dr Khaled Kamal, who joined Iowa State in 2024 after greater than a decade engaged on tasks linked to the European Area Company and NASA. Kamal research how microgravity disrupts the signalling pathways that maintain muscle wholesome, processes with names like mechanotransduction, the best way cells sense and reply to bodily pressure, alongside redox biology and intercellular communication inside the musculoskeletal system. His central focus is muscle atrophy, the losing that astronauts expertise on lengthy length missions to the Worldwide Area Station and that can solely turn out to be a larger concern as crews enterprise additional, in the direction of the Moon and ultimately Mars.
“We attempt to perceive how spaceflight induces this muscle atrophy on the molecular and mobile stage, the payoff is sensible as a lot as scientific, perceive the mechanism, and a countermeasure turns into attainable,” – Dr Khaled Kamal from Iowa State College
Recreating weightlessness on Earth is, naturally, moderately troublesome, so Kamal’s lab constructed one thing moderately intelligent! Iowa State’s first hindlimb unloading rodent mannequin that mimics among the bodily circumstances of microgravity with out leaving the bottom. Suspending an animal so its hind limbs bear no load successfully silences that very same dialog between muscle and gravity, letting researchers watch in actual time how muscle tissue senses the change and begins to reply, and giving them a testbed for therapies designed to protect muscle well being when that gravitational sign disappears.
What makes the analysis beneficial effectively past the area programme is that the physique doesn’t significantly care why gravity’s sign has gone quiet. The molecular pathways disrupted in microgravity overlap considerably with these concerned in age associated sarcopenia and Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a genetic situation that breaks down muscle from childhood. Kamal is now looking for new biomarkers, together with extracellular vesicle signatures and mechanosensitive signalling programs, that might sooner or later underpin monitoring instruments and coverings for astronauts on lengthy missions to the Moon and Mars, and equally for sufferers on Earth.
Microscopic view of striated skeletal muscle fibre, displaying the banded sample disrupted throughout muscle wastage (Credit score : Nephron)
The lab itself has turn out to be one thing of a gathering level, drawing in collaborators from animal science, machine studying, engineering and cell biology, together with graduate and undergraduate researchers. Amongst them is PhD scholar Hassan, who joined in spring 2025 after being drawn in, he says, by the thought of recreating what astronauts expertise beneath microgravity right here on the bottom. Kamal hopes the lab retains increasing that pipeline. As he places it, NASA wants biologists and physiologists each bit as a lot because it wants engineers, and Iowa’s rising area life science capability is beginning to produce each.
Supply : Iowa NASA EPSCoR Supports Iowa State University Research Connecting Spaceflight and Human Health
