Levels of Acid Sphingomyelinase (ASM) in <i>Caenorhabditis elegans</i> in Microgravity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Both Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) patients and astronauts in spaceflight suffer from muscle atrophy. Previous research suggests that the enzyme acid sphingomyelinase (ASM) may be involved in the pathogenesis of ALS, but it is not known if ASM influences muscle atrophy in microgravity. In this study, Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) were exposed to microgravity conditions on the International Space Station (ISS) within the confines of a Fluid Mixing Enclosure (FME). Return of the FME yielded 72,050 live nematodes, the first demonstration of C. elegans survival of space travel in an FME. After the nematodes returned to Earth, in much larger numbers than seen in previous FME experiments, the size and ASM expression levels in experimental worms were compared to control Earth-bound worms. C. elegans that returned from the ISS were larger in both length and cross-sectional area than the control worms, and they exhibited decreased expression of ASM-1 and ASM-2 proteins. Further research must be conducted to elucidate the role of ASM in muscle atrophy, as there were many limitations to this study. Understanding the role of ASM in muscle atrophy may lead to the discovery of novel targets for treatment of both ALS and muscle atrophy in microgravity. This study was a student led initiative and undertaken as a project within the Student Spaceflight Experiments Program (SSEP), under the auspices of the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education and the Arthur C. Clarke Institute for Space Education.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".