Courtesy of International Space Station National Laboratory

This past Saturday, a molecular biology experiment setup created by Isabel Jiang ’28 was launched to the International Space Station aboard the manned Crew-9 mission. 

Her experiment, the 2023 winner of the Genes in Space contest, will be performed by ISS crew members this coming week. Genes in Space is a collaboration between Boeing and miniPCR, a company that creates portable biotechnology equipment. Every year, hundreds of American high schoolers submit their ideas for molecular biology experiments to be done in space.

“It’s been a lot of opportunities that I could never have dreamed of a few years ago,” Jiang said.

Jiang’s experiment explores the activity of retrotransposons in space. Retrotransposons are RNA fragments that can copy and paste themselves throughout the human genome. When activated, certain retrotransposons can cause diseases including cancer and forms of neurodegeneration. 

On Earth, the human body is equipped to block retrotransposons from causing harmful mutations. 

However, little research exists about retrotransposons in space. Jiang’s experiment will observe retrotransposons aboard the ISS. 

The results could provide insights into astronauts’ health aboard the ISS. Additionally, they could validate a quick method of testing for the presence of certain RNA fragments, which could be used to detect RNA in viruses that cause illness.

Talking about the applications of space biology on Earth, Jiang compared the low-resource and low-equipment environment aboard a space station to less developed parts of the world, where quick and simple equipment is necessary.

Jiang submitted her experiment idea to the Genes in Space 2023 contest. After she was announced as a finalist in June 2023, she was assigned a mentor who helped her develop her idea further and work through any limitations.

“It’s really cool that you can be able to do these fundamental experiments in space, but it’s also a challenge,” Jiang told the News.

Jiang’s mentor, Aleks Radakovic, was a graduate student at Harvard at the time and is now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on the origins of life, not specifically on space biology. 

Radakovic helped Jiang prepare for a presentation at the annual ISS Research and Development conference, which she attended as a finalist. After Jiang won, he helped make the experiment a reality, along with scientists from Boeing and miniPCR.

“We encourage the students to propose as ambitious an experiment as they would like to do,” Radakovic said. “But considering the low resource environment of the International Space Station, a lot of the time that experiment needs to be trimmed down to something that’s actually doable.”

Jiang wasn’t able to achieve everything she initially outlined in her experiment. For example, certain equipment and measurement methods she identified hadn’t been tested, either with retrotransposons or in space. Therefore, it couldn’t be guaranteed that they would yield valid results.

The team decided to use nucleic acid sequence-based amplification, or NASBA, which would amplify the retrotransposons so that they could be measured. NASBA was a feasible option, given the NASBA tools and resources available through miniPCR on the ISS.

“[MiniPCR] concentrates on the science, getting the samples prepared,” Scott Copeland, co-founder of Genes in Space and Director for ISS Research Integration at Boeing, said. “Then we [at Boeing] do analytical integration to make sure everything’s good, all the paperwork and certifications, [and] get it physically on board and launched.”

Genes in Space plays an important role in making scientific education more accessible, Copeland said, because it gives students around the country a way to interact with molecular biology by thinking of their own experiment ideas. Additionally, there used to be less molecular biology research aboard the ISS, but collaboration with miniPCR has created more opportunities for this research to happen.

Jiang became the eleventh Genes in Space winner, Copeland said. Her experiment will be performed later this week, most likely by ISS crew member Don Pettit. Jiang will be able to watch via livestream as the experiment happens.

“[It’s] cool to be able to do something that’s setting the foundation for the future,” Jiang said.

The Space-X Crew-9 mission launched with Jiang’s experiment at 1:17 p.m. EDT Saturday, from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.