HOUSTON: Researchers working with astronauts on the International Space Station are embarking on a mission to discover the origin of Alzheimer’s. Although the details are still a little fuzzy, researchers believe that Alzheimer’s and similar diseases advance when certain proteins in the brain assemble themselves into long fibers that accumulate and ultimately strangle nerve cells in the brain.
“They’re sort of like the crankcase sludge of the human body,” explains Dan Woodard of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. “The fibers are not active, so they’ll be around forever because your body doesn’t have any way to get rid of them.”
These fibers take decades to form and accumulate—hence the link between Alzheimer’s and aging. In laboratories on Earth, researchers have figured out how to make protein fibers accumulate more quickly, so they can study the process without waiting so long.
On the space station, accumulated fibers do not collapse under their own weight, which makes the station an even better place to study them.
The experiment itself, SABOL, or Self-Assembly in Biology and the Origin of Life: A Study into Alzheimer’s, will be fully automated…