It would be possible to reproduce in space, depending on the results of a study published in the Proceedings of the American Academy of Sciences (PNAS). This experiment was carried out on mice.
Researchers led by Teruhiko Wakayama, a biologist at Yamanashi University in Kofu, Japan, sent freeze-dried sperm from 12 mice to the International Space Station (ISS) in 2013. The astronauts placed the samples in a freezer at – 95 ° C, where they remained 288 days. On Earth, the team stored sperm from the same mouse at the same temperature for the same period.
Perfectly healthy baby mice
When the space samples were sent back to Earth, scientists looked for signs of DNA damage from the radiation. As expected, sperm exposed to higher space rays near the station showed more fragmented DNA than sperm left on Earth. But when scientists injected space sperm into mouse eggs that they transferred to surrogate mothers, they were surprised to find that 3 weeks later, the females gave birth to 73 “space mice” .
The mice resulting from the experimental sperm were fertile and healthy, and there was no obvious genetic difference between the space mice and their control brethren. “The DNA damage was repaired after the fertilization and that it has “no final effect” on the offspring, “the researchers explained.
While the results of this study are encouraging, scientists need to investigate whether sperm from other mammalian species held in space for longer periods remain fertile. “They must also conduct studies under more realistic conditions in deep space,” says biophysicist Francis Cucinotta of the University of Nevada in Las Vegas in the United States, who was not involved in the research. “The most damaging radiation is outside the earth’s geomagnetic shielding,” well beyond the orbit of the ISS, he said. “There are much higher risks in deep spaces.”
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