Rodent Research/Biospecimen Sharing Program webinar - July 23, 2021

On July 23 2021, the NIH-NASA SPACE group hosted a webinar on the opportunities for sharing biological specimens from spaceflight-flown rodent research missions.

Dr. Candice Tahimic (UNF) joined us, where she presented on the project “Free Radical Theory of Aging in Space” (abstract below) supported by NASA-Space Biology and the ISS National Lab, which is investigating aging and oxidative stress in mice that are due to launch on a future experiment. The webinar is recorded here.

NIH is invited in the opportunity to collaborate with the team investigating aging in space to potentially get access to some space-flown rodent specimens. Interested parties should contact Dr. Tahimic (c.tahimic@unf.edu).

The webinar was also a great opportunity to foster discussion with group members who use rodent models (or whose grantees do) to learn more about NASA rodent research plans and opportunities, and discuss how NIH researchers might be able to get future access to tissues. These opportunities include collaborating directly with PIs planning spaceflight experiments, or by requesting access to specimens in the NASA Life Sciences Data Archive (LSDA) through the Biospecimen Sharing Program (BSP), which was developed to ensure that valuable tissue samples not used by the primary investigators could be distributed to other interested investigators. Alison French spoke about these opportunities (from 37m24s into the webinar recording) with additional details.

This recording is likely to be of high interest to NIA, NIAMS, anyone with an interest in mitochondrial ROS, and anyone thinking that space-flown samples might be informative for their own research/research portfolios. We encourage you to watch the recording and contact the relevant folks with questions!


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