Nasa to launch yeast beyond Moon this year

Chennai: The common yeast could give the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) the clue it needs to see if humans can survive in deep space.  It plans to soon launch  yeast, which is a unicellular fungi, in a nano-satellite for an 18-month mission over five lakh kilometres beyond the moon to see how it performs in these conditions.

Speaking to the Deccan Chronicle on the sidelines of Shaastra, IIT-M’s annual technical festival on Saturday, Sharmila Bhattacharya, director of research in the Biomodel Performance Laboratory of the Space Biosciences Division of the Nasa Ames Research Centre, says Nasa has started to put micro-organisms in deep space to give it some idea of how  humans can survive in it.

“We want to see at a fundamental level what  the problems can be when sending humans into deep space. Once you understand the problems and the molecular biological pathway you can  start looking at the counter measures. We are doing this over the next few years,” she said, explaining that yeast is a single cell eukaryotic organism, which means the structure of its cell is somewhat similar to that of humans.

“Because its single cell you will see significant percentage of similarity between humans and the yeast. The basic principle of how all these eukaryotic organism function are similar, but the difference is in their complexity and in the number of genes,” she adds.

Interestingly, Nasa in its next mission  launching on February 22 will send  a fruit fly to outer space on a private spacecraft (SpaceX rocket-SpX-5) to  study its cardio vascular functions as the human genome is 77 per cent similar to it.