4 ms·

There's research that can only be done in space because the microgravity allows smaller forces to be isolated and studied in ways they can't be on Earth. For on

by rtkwe 5y ago

There's research that can only be done in space because the microgravity allows smaller forces to be isolated and studied in ways they can't be on Earth. For one example they can grow protein crystals better up there which allow studying their structure and finding medical interventions to treat the diseases associated with them. https://www.issnationallab.org/iss360/probing-proteins-leveraging-microgravity-for-medically-important-molecular-crystallization/ https://www.issnationallab.org/iss360/probing-proteins-lever...

jqpabc123 5y ago
So there is a "protein crystal disease"? How many people suffer from this?
- rtkwe 5y ago
  Yes lots of diseases manifest as malformed proteins, to understand them you need to know the structure of the protein which is commonly done using x-ray crystallography which requires growing a crystal made of the thing you're studying. It's the way we learned the shape of DNA and a fundamental process for studying a lot of biological systems. Growing those crystals is tough on Earth because of gravity so they grew some on ISS they'd never managed to grow on Earth.
  - jqpabc123 5y ago
    ...they grew some on ISS they'd never managed to grow on Earth. It's nice they were able to grow some crystals that never occur on earth because of --- gravity. But is this valuable in any way back on earth? Highly doubtful. Probably about as productive as funding for an anti-gravity device on earth --- which the military is doing by the way.
    - rtkwe 5y ago
      I've said it 2 times now basically but I'll spell it out I guess. With the crystals they can determine the structure of errant proteins and develop treatments to target them to help people with the diseases these proteins create. Without the structure of the protein this is on the scale of extremely difficult to impossible.

4 ms·

There's research that can only be done in space because the microgravity allows smaller forces to be isolated and studied in ways they can't be on Earth. For on

by rtkwe 5y ago

jqpabc123 5y ago
So there is a "protein crystal disease"? How many people suffer from this?
- rtkwe 5y ago
  Yes lots of diseases manifest as malformed proteins, to understand them you need to know the structure of the protein which is commonly done using x-ray crystallography which requires growing a crystal made of the thing you're studying. It's the way we learned the shape of DNA and a fundamental process for studying a lot of biological systems. Growing those crystals is tough on Earth because of gravity so they grew some on ISS they'd never managed to grow on Earth.
  - jqpabc123 5y ago
    ...they grew some on ISS they'd never managed to grow on Earth. It's nice they were able to grow some crystals that never occur on earth because of --- gravity. But is this valuable in any way back on earth? Highly doubtful. Probably about as productive as funding for an anti-gravity device on earth --- which the military is doing by the way.
    - rtkwe 5y ago
      I've said it 2 times now basically but I'll spell it out I guess. With the crystals they can determine the structure of errant proteins and develop treatments to target them to help people with the diseases these proteins create. Without the structure of the protein this is on the scale of extremely difficult to impossible.