“Our ‘astronauts’ are fruit flies”

As two astronauts remain stranded aboard the International Space Station, with no way home expected until early 2025, a group of University of Calgary researchers is exploring how prolonged exposure to microgravity — a reality those astronauts are now experiencing — impacts the body.

Dr. Savraj Grewal, PhD, of the Cumming School or Medicine, and Dr. Giuseppe Iaria, PhD, of the Faculty of Arts, along with graduate students Tejdeep Jaswal, BSc’23, and research assistant Justin Ma-Phan, BHSc’24, aim to understand the effects of prolonged microgravity with their novel Astro Fly study being conducted in the Grewal lab. 

“Astro Fly is a very important transdisciplinary project,” says Iaria. “It is our chance to investigate the true impact microgravity has on human health in a fast and cost-effective way.

“Our ‘astronauts’ are fruit flies. Their lifespan is 60 to 80 days, which provides us with an amazing opportunity to replicate a significant long-duration space-travel experience, all done within our own laboratory.”  

Fruit flies, scientifically known as Drosophila melanogaster, share 60 per cent of their genes with humans, which makes them an excellent model to investigate impacts on human health. For one study, fruit flies live in an environment that simulates the low-gravity conditions experienced in space as they are in a continuously rotating device to simulate prolonged microgravity. This allows the team to study how the insects’ health is impacted and estimate how these same conditions would impact humans. 

“We’re able to use the fruit fly as a system to ask questions about physiology and metabolism that are essentially out of this world,” says Grewal. “To figure out how astronauts respond to a long exposure tomicrogravity is a very important issue that we're really looking forward to explore.”   

The researchers are investigating effects on the body and the brain. Ma-Phan’s research examines the impaired spatial awareness astronauts report following exposure to microgravity by observing the flies’ behaviour and ability to find their way around a maze. 

“It's really exciting because, with this model, we're able to look into the physiological mechanisms that flies go under, and how they cope, once they're interacting with microgravity,” says Ma-Phan. 

Jaswal’s project compares flies that live a significant portion of their life in microgravity to ones living withEarth’s gravity to investigate any differences in their health. Being a psychology major, Jaswal says she never imagined she would end up working on a project like Astro Fly. It wasn’t until she met Ma-Phan in one of her labs that she discovered her passion for the topic.  

“It was very interesting how he was combining two different disciplines, and that's kind of what got me interested in this project,” says Jaswal.  

“It's exciting because it's novel. So, it's interesting to do something that's so unique and innovative and can further impact this field.” 

While its focus is on space and microgravity, the team’s research also reveals important things about how inactivity affects the human body.  

“Gaining knowledge on the impact of microgravity on human health will translate into knowledge and, eventually, interventions that will help to limit the negative impact of inactivity on human health,” says Iaria. 

“Thinking about bone health, cardiovascular health and other situations, brief periods of microgravity here on Earth may actually turn out to be helpful to some people.” 

Ma-Phan hopes more researchers will get involved in this work to further the knowledge.  

“We hope that, because we're making it more accessible, other researchers from any discipline can pick up this work and apply it to their own research questions,” he says.  

The team will be sharing preliminary data from Astro Fly at the 2024 Canadian Space Health Research Symposium this November in London, Ont.

“The symposium is going to be an opportunity for everyone to learn about the important questions that we will be able to answer through model organisms, and hopefully an inspiration for trainees and young investigators to embark on a fascinating space-health, transdisciplinary research career in science,” Iaria says. 

Astro Fly is supported by UCalgary’s Vice-President Research Transdisciplinary Initiating Connector Grant Program, a funding initiative that aims to facilitate the creation of innovative transdisciplinary opportunities.   

The study is complementary to Iaria’s Wayfinding project (funded by the Canadian Space Agency) in the NeuroLab that investigates the cognitive and neurological effects of exposure to microgravity in astronauts returning from missions to the International Space Station.