🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <2249@silver.bacs.indiana.edu> I wrote:
>                                                                    [. . .]
>bird eggs (as well as reptile eggs) are even larger and yolkier than amphibian
>eggs, and while it is predicted that the absence of gravity will not disturb
>amphibian eggs (or reptile or bird eggs) -- that is, it takes gravity in the
>wrong direction and at the right time to mess up development -- the required
>data is not yet available.  Experiments to test the development of amphibian
>and fish (similar kind of eggs and development) embryos in space are being
>designed in the Department of Biology at Indiana University.

	I just heard a talk at the Indiana University Department of Biology
retreat on space biology, which gave me some information on these matters that
I hadn't heard before.  One piece of information is that it looks like (but is
not certain) that some of the cell migrations early in chicken development
which are normally vertical or near-vertical may actually depend on gravity
rather than just that gravity not be in the wrong direction.

>	It is my understanding that rats were taken up on one of the Skylab
>flights (unless I am getting mixed up and it is the Russians that did this)
>and allowed to mate and produce offspring.  [. . .]

	I guess I must have gotten this mixed up.  According to the same talk,
rats were taken up on the Space Shuttle after fertilization (I'm not sure just
how long after) and allowed to continue towards term; however, the Space
Shuttle flights are not long enough to allow rats to develop all the way from
fertilization to birth in space.  The rats came back down, and the embryos
which had done part of their development in microgravity were born as normal
rats.

	-- Lucius Chiaraviglio
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-- 
	-- Lucius Chiaraviglio
ARPAnet:   chiaravi@silver.bacs.indiana.edu
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