Earth-Independent Laboratory Capabilities

Previous missions to the ISS have testing nanopore sequencing from DNA libraries prepared on-Earth that were shipped to the ISS. 

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Further missions have sequenced microbial DNA collected from the ISS environment. But to date, human DNA has not been collected and sequenced during spaceflight. 

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During my time as a researcher in the Mason lab, I developed Dragon-seq, which was designed to sequenced human DNA within the environmental constraints of a SpaceX Dragon capsule (manuscript in preparation). 

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The challenges of this process have highlighted the need for translating standard molecular biology and genomic assays for microgravity to monitor astronaut health and perform research experiments on long duration missions and other Earth-independent environments.