A team of scientists from the University of Nottingham, led by researcher Nathaniel Szewczyk, has found that spaceflight suppresses the accumulation of toxic proteins that are normally deposited in aging muscles , at least in Caenorhabditis elegans worms. As if that were not enough, traveling through space suppresses the activity of seven genes whose absence of expression has previously been linked to increased life expectancy. According to Szewczyk, an expert in muscle metabolism, in the journal Scientific Reports , "everything indicates that these genes are involved in the way the worm perceives its environment and in how its metabolism responds."
For future astronauts who star in manned flights to the Moon or Mars, this finding will have implications, since everything indicates that their muscles will be kept younger in space than at ground level. And it's even possible that spaceflight slows the human aging process , as Szewczyk suggests.
The C. elegans worm is the perfect substitute for studying long-term changes in human physiology , as it undergoes muscle atrophy – loss of muscle mass – in much the same way as humans. With 20,000 genes, C. elegans was the first multicellular organism whose genome was completely sequenced.
