In a fraction of a second, important biochemistry experiments—two of which were created by U of T scientists—went up in smoke when the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated in the skies over Texas last Saturday morning, killing its crew of seven.
Dinsesh Christendat, a researcher in the botany department, and Reginald Gorczynski, a professor with the University Health Network, had their hopes crushed by the Columbia disaster, as years worth of experiments disintegrated before their eyes.
“I was always expecting that everything would be fine,” said a dejected Christendat yesterday. “The loss of life is a major concern; the loss of experimental data is secondary.”
The Canadian Space Agency—in association with U of T, the Université de Montreal, the Université de Laval and the University of Saskatchewan—arranged for 144 tiny test tubes of protein chemistry experiments to fly in the ill-fated mission.
Christendat’s experiment was designed to aid in the development of better drugs: “We’re studying the mechanism of antibiotic resistance in bacteria,” he said.
Bacteria rely on proteins to invade human cells. By studying protein crystals, Christendat hoped to shed light on how these proteins help bacteria become resistant to antibiotics. “We can build or design novel drugs to combat microbial resistance,” he said.
Simple molecules form crystals easily under a wide range of conditions—the sodium chloride crystal, for example, is table salt. But a protein crystal is a complex beast, and creating one is a tedious process of trial and error, sometimes taking years.
After a protein is teased into forming a crystal, scientists shine X-rays through it. This X-ray data is used to construct a highly detailed map of the molecular structure of the protein. This structural information is hugely valuable when it comes to designing drugs, such as antibiotics, that block protein activity.
But the data gleaned from X-ray analysis is only as good as the quality of the protein crystal—and crystals grown in the absence of gravity, on space shuttle missions, are the best scientists can get. “One of the advantages of microgravity is that it improves the quality of the protein crystal,” said Christendat.
Christendat spent more than a year designing the experiment, which would have involved a trip to a sophisticated X-ray crystallography facility at Brookhaven, N.Y. “We have planned all the trips to the Synchrotron, everything was scheduled,” he said.
“It is a setback in general, but it will not have a detrimental impact on the whole.”
Gorczynski’s Columbia experiment sought to connect bone loss, sleep deprivation, and the immune system. For years, scientists have known that astronauts lose bone mass at a very rapid rate while in the weightless environment of orbit. Astronauts’ bones get brittle 10 times faster than those of people suffering from osteoporosis on earth.
“We were flying bone cells in space, and comparing them with bone cells on the ground,” Gorczynski said. “We had evidence already that bone loss lay in not just microgravity, but sleep disruption,” so Gorczynski tried to simulate lack of sleep in space: “We were including serum from sleep-deprived animals.”
Gorczynski said the experiment represented “two to three years” of work and hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“I was devastated, more at the personal level, I have to admit,” he added.
Gorczynski is concerned that if space shuttle flights are put on hold— as they were, for two years, after the Challenger disaster in 1986—he may never complete this part of his research. “Unless the shuttle flies again, no-one will be doing it, and that’s a NASA decision.”
Photograph by Simon Turnbull
