We are thrilled to announce that, together with the NeuronGrav team, we will attend the upcoming 2022 IAC next September in Paris.
The NeuronGrav team was the winner of our first Glide Your Experiment! challenge: its goal was, in the same spirit as ESA’s Fly your thesis!, to organize a call for experiments and to offer selected students teams the opportunity to conduct their own microgravity or hypergravity experiments on board a glider during parabolic flights.
José (medical student at the Faculty of Medicine – University of Lisbon), Barbara (PhD student in Biomedicine at the Institute of Biomedicine – University of Aveiro), Sara (PhD student in Biotechnology at the COMPASS Research Group), and Filipe (student in Aerospace Engineering at the Faculty of Engineering – University of Beira Interior) proposed an exciting research project, which aim is to study how neuronal cells react in altered gravity. Thanks to the support of SELGRA, the student chapter of the European Low Gravity Research Association (ELGRA), they will benefit from a technical support to setup their experiment. They have also been offered a travel grant to flight their experimental apparatus onboard LIDE’s glider at Saint-Hubert airport, in Belgium, this summer.
The goal of the NeuronGrav (Neuronal responses in altered Gravity) experiment is to characterize adaptative alterations induced on human neuronal-like cells by short exposures to altered gravity. Previous studies have demonstrated modulation of neuronal plasticity, and changes in neuron morphology and viability, followed by fast recovery processes upon short periods of exposure to microgravity. Our main contribution is to discuss the possibility to reproduce and further characterize these observed effects during parabolic flights performed with a glider.
Our abstract, “NeuronGrav: Characterizing neuronal responses in altered gravity via glider-based parabolic flights” has been accepted for an oral presentation for the next International Astronautical Congress, which will take place next September in Paris. Stay tuned for more information regarding the preparation of the NeuronGrav flights!