San Francisco

The space-shuttle programme may be on hold, but NASA researchers are still dreaming of the future. Ten days after the Columbia broke apart on re-entry, scientists gathered at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), to discuss the development of futuristic spacecraft modelled on living cells.

The day-long event, held on 10 February, inaugurated the Institute for Cell Mimetic Space Exploration, which is funded mainly by a ten-year, US$30-million grant from NASA. The agency hopes that the institute's 15 principal investigators, housed at UCLA and several other southwestern universities, will come up with biology-inspired devices that could facilitate space travel 30 years from now.

It's an open-ended goal, admits Harry Partridge, an administrator at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. “Instead of asking what do we need and how do we get there, this asks what is possible and what we can do with what we come up with,” he says.

Most of the research groups are exploring basic cellular processes that might later be scaled up. Biomedical engineer Carlo Montemagno's group at UCLA, for example, is developing microscopic sacks of biological reagents — which the group calls 'biobugs' — that propel themselves, amoeba-like, across a substrate. The sacks will include growing filaments of actin, which normally make up the skeletons of living cells. According to Montemagno's theory, the biobags will move at several micrometres per minute by extending an actin filament and pulling themselves along it.

Montemagno says that the goal is to endow the biobugs with the ability to sniff out and move towards specific substances, in much the same way that nerve tips grow towards chemical signals in the body. Biobugs could be dispatched en masse to search a spaceship for chemical or biological contamination, Montemagno suggests.

Other groups are copying different systems from the book of life, such as networks that gather sunlight, transmit information through chemical signals and repair structural damage.

The inaugural event was planned before the Columbia disaster, and NASA administrators decided to hold it as scheduled. “In the spirit of exploration, things must go on,” says the director of the institute Chih-Ming Ho, an aerospace engineer at UCLA.

→ http://www.cmise.ucla.edu