UC Science Today

One of the challenges of manned space missions is the cost and that includes the necessity to have supplies on-hand that allow astronauts to survive. Postdoctoral scholar Amor Menezes of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory says another challenge is the shelf-life of medical supplies.

"Pharmaceuticals expire quicker in space than they do on Earth. So if an astronaut has a medical emergency in space and the pharmaceuticals or the medication that is required is already expired, is no longer useful, you would have to ship medical supplies, which is tremendously costly, right? Plus, you don’t know if it’s going to reach in time, which means that the astronaut’s life is in danger."

Menezes has been analyzing alternative methods of producing supplies such as food and pharmaceuticals that are less costly to transport through long space missions.

"And so the ability to manufacture pharmaceuticals in real time is very important and it cuts cost, the cost is basically the life and timeliness."

Dealing with toxic materials is an ancient problem. Biologist Amro Hamdoun of the University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography says there’s a warfare going on all the time in nature.

"For example, plants often defend themselves against insects that try to eat them by making compounds that are bitter or toxic. And those compounds in turn can be recognized by the defenses that are present in the insect and eliminated and there is this constant warfare where each party in this battle is trying to gain a competitive advantage. Over time, organisms have evolved these very robust defenses against these compounds in the environment."

Hamdoun is looking to the sea urchin to better understand how environmental compounds affect humans.

"It has a fully sequenced genome so that we manipulate and study their functions in the lab very readily. I like to say it is a bit like a marine fruit fly."

Dealing with toxic materials is an ancient problem. Biologist Amro Hamdoun of the University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography says there’s a warfare going on all the time in nature.

"For example, plants often defend themselves against insects that try to eat them by making compounds that are bitter or toxic. And those compounds in turn can be recognized by the defenses that are present in the insect and eliminated and there is this constant warfare where each party in this battle is trying to gain a competitive advantage. Over time, organisms have evolved these very robust defenses against these compounds in the environment."

Hamdoun is looking to the sea urchin to better understand how environmental compounds affect humans.

"It has a fully sequenced genome so that we manipulate and study their functions in the lab very readily. I like to say it is a bit like a marine fruit fly."

One of the challenges of manned space missions is the cost and that includes the necessity to have supplies on-hand that allow astronauts to survive. Postdoctoral scholar Amor Menezes of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory says another challenge is the shelf-life of medical supplies.

"Pharmaceuticals expire quicker in space than they do on Earth. So if an astronaut has a medical emergency in space and the pharmaceuticals or the medication that is required is already expired, is no longer useful, you would have to ship medical supplies, which is tremendously costly, right? Plus, you don’t know if it’s going to reach in time, which means that the astronaut’s life is in danger."

Menezes has been analyzing alternative methods of producing supplies such as food and pharmaceuticals that are less costly to transport through long space missions.

"And so the ability to manufacture pharmaceuticals in real time is very important and it cuts cost, the cost is basically the life and timeliness."

One of the challenges of manned space missions is the cost and that includes the necessity to have supplies on-hand that allow astronauts to survive. Postdoctoral scholar Amor Menezes of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory says another challenge is the shelf-life of medical supplies.

"Pharmaceuticals expire quicker in space than they do on Earth. So if an astronaut has a medical emergency in space and the pharmaceuticals or the medication that is required is already expired, is no longer useful, you would have to ship medical supplies, which is tremendously costly, right? Plus, you don’t know if it’s going to reach in time, which means that the astronaut’s life is in danger."

Menezes has been analyzing alternative methods of producing supplies such as food and pharmaceuticals that are less costly to transport through long space missions.

"And so the ability to manufacture pharmaceuticals in real time is very important and it cuts cost, the cost is basically the life and timeliness."

Fine particulate matter, or PM2.5, are potentially deadly air particles smaller than 2.5 micrometers in diameter and can be inhaled deeply into the lungs because of their small size. Environmental engineer Josh Apte of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory says that large urban cities are at greater risk because the particles can come from different sources.

"Traffic is a big contributor to PM2.5. Power plants are a big contributor. Any time you burn something, you’re going to get PM2.5. Because of all the different types of sources that you have in a city, you tend to get sort of a regional cloud of PM2.5. So in terms of the environmental risk factors for death, it’s right up there as one of the most important risks that really takes years and years off of people’s lives when you get a condition that leads to you getting as stroke, for instance, all because you have been living in a city with bad air."

Apte studied traffic-related air pollution in New Delhi, India to develop global strategies for PM2.5 and other pollutants.

"It points to the fact that there’s one major source of air pollution among many in the city that could be brought down quite a bit."

Supernovas are stellar explosions from stars that can be up to hundreds of millions of light years away. And while studying these events might seem trivial to some, senior staff scientist Peter Nugent of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory says that one reason they’re important is because we are made from the elements they create.

“Everything around us is the product of a supernova explosion. That’s how you convert hydrogen and helium, which were made during the Big Bang into everything else. Carl Sagan once famously said “we are star stuff”. So, the calcium in our bones, the iron that’s in our cars, the gold that we have in our rings – all of that comes from a supernova explosion. So, if you want to understand why there’s what we call nucleosynthesis products in a supernova, why our world is made up of the materials that’s in it, it’s related to a supernova explosion.”

The human body is an incredibly complex and efficient system and when it’s homeostatic – that is, internally stable, all is well. But for patients with multiple sclerosis, the symptoms can be devastating.

"We think of our bodies as following our commands and especially, our nervous systems. We really think our nervous system, in many ways, as the physical manifestation of ourselves and so for these things not to work for many patients is understandably really disorienting."

Dr. Ari Green of the University of California, San Francisco is part of a team that’s identified eight FDA-approved drugs that may stimulate nervous system repair in multiple sclerosis. The most effective of the drugs is an over-the-counter antihistamine, which is being moved quickly into clinical trial as a potential therapy for MS.

"That was one of the reasons why we wanted to pursue evaluation of FDA-approved compounds. They’ve already been discovered. That biology is known, it’s just not known how that biology affects individual classes of cells."

The human body is an incredibly complex and efficient system and when it’s homeostatic – that is, internally stable, all is well. But for patients with multiple sclerosis, the symptoms can be devastating.

"We think of our bodies as following our commands and especially, our nervous systems. We really think our nervous system, in many ways, as the physical manifestation of ourselves and so for these things not to work for many patients is understandably really disorienting."

Dr. Ari Green of the University of California, San Francisco is part of a team that’s identified eight FDA-approved drugs that may stimulate nervous system repair in multiple sclerosis. The most effective of the drugs is an over-the-counter antihistamine, which is being moved quickly into clinical trial as a potential therapy for MS.

"That was one of the reasons why we wanted to pursue evaluation of FDA-approved compounds. They’ve already been discovered. That biology is known, it’s just not known how that biology affects individual classes of cells."

There are about 80 thousand synthetic industrial compounds that have been made in the last century. That includes everything from plastics to flame retardants to pesticides.

"The problem with industrial compounds is that many of them have structures that are not commonly seen in nature. So, organisms simply have not had a chance to evolve defenses against these compounds."

Amro Hamdoun of the University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography is studying how these compounds move through the environment and ultimately, how they may affect human health. To do this, his lab is looking at the sea urchin.

"This is an organism that has been used for more than 100 years in basic cell and developmental biology researcher and it has a fully sequenced genome so that we can manipulate the drug transporters and study their functions and their interactions in the lab very readily. I like to say it is a bit like a marine fruit fly."