Background For tendon tissue engineering, tenocyte-seeded scaffolds are a promising approach. Under conventional 2D culture however, tenocytes show rapid senescene and phenotype loss. We hypothesized that phenotype loss could be counteracted by simulated microgravity conditions. Methods Human tenocytes were exposed to microgravity for 9 days on a Random Positioning Machine (RPM). Formation of...

Influence of gravity forces on the regulation of protein expression by healthy and malignant thyroid cells was studied with the aim to identify protein interactions. Western blot analyses of a limited number of proteins suggested a time-dependent regulation of protein expression by simulated microgravity. After applying free flow isoelectric focusing and mass spectrometry to search for differen...

INTRODUCTION The effect of reducing gravity on locomotion has been studied using microgravity analogues. However, there is no known literature comparing locomotion in actual microgravity (AM) to locomotion in simulated microgravity (SM). METHODS Five subjects were tested while walking at 1.34 m x s(-1) and running at 3.13 m x s(-1) on a treadmill during parabolic flight and on a microgravity ...

In this work, rising of a single bubble in a quiescent liquid under microgravity condition was simulated. The related unsteady incompressible full Navier-Stokes equations were solved using a conventional finite difference method with a structured staggered grid. The interface was tracked explicitly by connected marker points via hybrid front capturing and tracking method. One field approximatio...

As a representative fluoroquinolone antibacterial, ciprofloxacin is frequently used to treat infections caused by bacteria such as E. coli. It is much meaningful to explore ciprofloxacin susceptibility and investigate a possible mechanism of drug susceptibility changes in E. coli ATCC25922 exposed to the environmental stress of simulated microgravity. The subculture of E. coli lasted for 7 days...

BACKGROUND Leukemia inhibitory factor (LIF) is an indispensable factor for maintaining mouse embryonic stem (ES) cell pluripotency. A feeder layer and serum are also needed to maintain an undifferentiated state, however, such animal derived materials need to be eliminated for clinical applications. Therefore, a more reliable ES cell culture technique is required. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDING...

Microgravity causes multiple changes in physical and mental levels in humans, which can induce performance deficiency among astronauts. Studying the variations in brain activity that occur during microgravity would help astronauts to deal with these changes. In the current study, resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) was used to observe the variations in brain activity d...

The purpose of this study was to test the hypothesis that differential autoregulation of cerebral and hindquarter arteries during simulated microgravity is mediated or modulated by differential activation of K(+) channels in vascular smooth muscle cells (VSMCs) of arteries in different anatomic regions. Sprague-Dawley rats were subjected to 1- and 4-wk tail suspension to simulate the cardiovasc...

TO THE EDITOR: After two decades of animal studies on vascular adaptation to microgravity using the rat analog (for review, see Ref. 3), it is gratifying to note the recently published findings on space-flown mice by Sofronova and coworkers (1). They demonstrate that both vasoconstrictor and vasodilator properties are attenuated in basilar arteries (BA) isolated from the mice flown 30 days on a...