NEW DELHI: India is set to undertake its first-ever biological experiments aboard the International Space Station (ISS). Announcing this on Thursday, Union Minister for Science and Technology Dr Jitendra Singh said the experiments would “study the sustainability of life in space as an important initiative under the BioE3 Biotechnology policy launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.”Dr Singh said these unique experiments, spearheaded by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) in collaboration with the Department of Biotechnology (DBT), will be conducted as part of the upcoming ISS mission AXIOM-4, which includes Indian astronaut Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla as a crew member.He said the first experiment aboard the ISS would examine the impact of microgravity and space radiation on the growth of edible microalgae. “This project is a joint initiative of ISRO, NASA and DBT with an aim to analyse key growth parameters and changes in transcriptomes, proteomes and metabolomes of different algal species in space as compared to Earth-based controls,” he said.
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