Heart cells tagged posts

Learning how spaceflight affects living organisms will help us understand potential health risks related to humans on long duration missions, including our journey to Mars. Cells, microbes, animals and plants are affected by microgravity, and studying the processes involved in adaptation to spaceflight increases our fundamental understanding of biological processes on Earth. Results on Earth from biological research in space include the development of new medications, improved agriculture, advancements in tissue engineering and regeneration etc.
Some biological research experiments on the ISS:

Biomolecule Sequencing

Biomolecule Sequencer: hopes to demonstrate (for the first time) that DNA sequencing is feasible in an orbiting spacecraft...

Heart cells are shown. Blue indicates nuclei. Credit: Yoshida Laboratory, CiRA, Kyoto University

Cell therapies for heart ailments involve transplanting over a billion heart cells to the patient’s heart. Many of these cells fail to engraft, however, compromising the benefits. One reason for the poor engraftment is that normally the heart cell population is a mixture of cells with different maturation. Researchers have now identified an ideal maturation stage that enhances engraftment and may reduce the number of cells required for therapy.

Under the direction of Sr Lecturer Yoshinori Yoshida, Dr Funakoshi took induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells that were reprogrammed from skin cells and made them into heart cells...