Flight-Scope: Microscopy With Microfluidics In Microgravity

With the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA working to return humans to the moon and onwards to Mars, it has never been more important to study the impact of altered gravity conditions on biological organisms. These include astronauts but also useful micro-organisms they may bring with them to produce food, medicine, and other useful compounds by synthetic biology.

Parabolic flights are one of the most accessible microgravity research platforms but present their own challenges: relatively short periods of altered gravity (∼20s) and aircraft vibration. Live-imaging is necessary in these altered-gravity conditions to readout any real-time phenotypes.

Here we present Flight-Scope, a new microscopy and microfluidics platform to study dynamic cellular processes during the short, altered gravity periods on parabolic flights. We demonstrated Flight-Scope’s capability by performing live and dynamic imaging of fluorescent glucose uptake by yeast, S. cerevisiae, on board an ESA parabolic flight.

Flight-Scope operated well in this challenging environment, opening the way for future microgravity experiments on biological organisms.

Flight-Scope microscope with (i) motorised xy stage (ii) a central vibration mast which absorbs vibrations felt by the optical train. B. The microscope optical train is shown in the red outline and consists of (iii) a fluorescence LED, (vi) — biorxiv.org

Brightfield image of yeast cells taken while Flight-Scope was mounted on a benchtop centrifuge. B. A zoomed-in ROI brightfield taken on the centrifuge. C. Plot of correlation coefficient of cell position in consecutive frames vs time for images taken while the microscope was on the centrifuge. D. Brightfield image of yeast cells taken while the microscope was mounted inside a van. E. A zoomed-in ROI brightfield taken on the van. F. Plot of correlation coefficient of cell position in consecutive frames vs time for images taken while the microscope was mounted inside a van. — biorxiv.org

The Flight-Scope syringe pump with clasp-based syringe rack (i) and user interface (ii). B. Syringe driver schematic. C. Panel-mounted sample system with syringe-rack, inlet ports (right) and outlet ports in green (left). D. Fluorescent 2-NBDG uptake vs. time of yeast cells for 10M 2-NBDG concentration n=20 cells, black dotted lines are individual cell traces with their mean (red lind) and standard error (red shading). E. Brightfield image of yeast taken with the Flight-Scope and F. fluorescence images taken over a course of 15,23,38,50 seconds after 2-NBDG injection showing increases in cell intensity over time. — biorxiv.org

Flight-Scope: microscopy with microfluidics in microgravity, biorxiv.org/

Astrobiology