Abstract
The new era of human exploration makes it more important to fully understand and provide countermeasures against the effects of the space environment on the human body. Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) is a genetic model organism used to study physiology on Earth, and the utility of C. elegans has proven to be a highly versatile experimental animal in studies spanning the aspects of genetics, development, aging, muscle physiology, radiobiology, and other issues. Many of these basic research issues are also relevant to space biology and medicine as an attempt to understand the alterations of living systems exposed to the space environment and to quantify the risks of living and working in space. Therefore, before the ISS, many space experiments using C. elegans have been done. This chapter introduces recent space experiments conducted in ISS. All these experiments have shown that C. elegans is the good model for space biology and also a useful model for understanding human physiology and medicine. The first international C. elegans space experiment carried out in the ISS (International Space Station) under construction and the recent space experiments implemented in ISS after completion of assembly are introduced. These space experiments in ISS have shown that C. elegans is useful as a model organism of the space experiment, and the obtained results are interrelated, and also related to problems in space biology and medicine. All these experiments have shown that C. elegans is the good model for space biology and also a useful model for understanding human physiology and medicine.
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Ishioka, N., Higashibata, A. (2019). Space Experiments Using C. elegans as a Model Organism. In: Pathak, Y., Araújo dos Santos, M., Zea, L. (eds) Handbook of Space Pharmaceuticals. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50909-9_3-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50909-9_3-1
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