My team, [lead by Professor Porterfield], submitted to a call for proposals to NASA [The Facilitated Access to the Space Environment for Technology (FAST)] in April. The following month our proposal was accepted to fly on the lunar gravity flights. We had three months to get ready.

The project was centered on a biochip capable of measuring calcium currents from plant cells, Ceratopteris richardii, in response to changes in gravity. The biochip we called, Cell Electrophysiology Lab on Chip, or CELC 2. This was the second generation.

The project had two main parts:
• The CELC2 biochip, which was fabricated at Purdue in Birck Nanotechnology Building by Amani Salim, a postdoctoral fellow (Weldon PhD BME under Prof. Ziaie, 2009) and Andrew Hermann, an MS student in [Agricultural and Biological Engineering (ABE)].
• The electronics for preprocessing the signal and the software for acquiring the data, which was completed by a sophomore in ABE, Pedro Jofre, as part of his [Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF)] program.
I served as the team leader and directly mentored Pedro Jofre.

As soon as we arrived to Houston, we converted our hotel room into a mini-laboratory. We didn’t let the custodian come into a room because it was quite suspicious!

During the flight week, each night we had to manually load the plant cells into wells on the biochip in preparation for the flight the next day. Each biochip consisted of 15 wells. The plant cells were held in place with a thick substance, agar, similar to Jell-O.

Because our overall system was very compact - and in some sense portable, NASA let us stay an extra two days to experience Zero-G. We had initially been granted only lunar gravity.

Staying the two extra days to experience the “weightless wonder” was well worth it. It was AMAZING! It is quite difficult to describe the feeling but I would certainly do it again. Luckily, none of us threw up throughout the entire trip. Boiler UP!

Our experimental setup was much simpler than other teams in the aircraft because all we had to do was plug in our biochip, like a Nintendo cartridge, and click run on the computer. As the computer collected the data we kicked back and enjoyed the reduced gravity experience! Disclaimer: We checked the data periodically to make sure everything was OK.

Overall the experience was enjoyable, we ran into several challenges but as BOILERMAKERS we were able to think up quick solutions to solve many of the problems we encountered.

The project is still ongoing. Future work includes:
• An extension of this project, which has been funded by NASA will involve using the CELC2 to measure calcium currents from plant cells while in space.
• The CELC2 is a versatile platform that can be applied to biological sensing in cultured mammalian cells. By simply changing the functionalization scheme, one can sense important physiological analytes such as oxygen, pH, GABA and much more. I believe this is the goal that the Purdue University Physiological Sensing Facility is striving for.

Several people helped us throughout the summer, especially Kyle Amick, [BS BME 2009], from the BME Machine shop and Gail Lockwood, the Purdue Chief Wire bonder, from Physics & Birck. Thanks, Kyle and Gail! Also, I would like to include a big thanks to members of the Purdue IDEAS Lab for assistance with assembling the electronics.

Submitted by: Kachi Odoemene