Zach Gagnon
Johns Hopkins University
Long missions in deep space present a new set of challenges for maintaining the health, safety and performance of crews. In particular, the ability to screen for disease, establish deviations from health, and detect viral or bacterial infections both in humans and in cabin air or water systems are essential requirements for assuring the health of crew members during flight missions. Many standard screening methods for analyzing, for example, protein and nucleic acids, are not ideal for space flight missions because they often require long processing times, are labor intensive and often use hazardous chemicals. The goal of this project is to is to utilize the electrokinetic method, isotachophoresis (ITP) to develop a liquid handling and sample acquisition technology that is capable of simultaneous extraction of both proteins and nucleic acids from human body fluids and cabin water. Because separation, concentration and extraction of both nucleic acids and proteins will be accomplished in a single step, the success of this project will lead to dramatic improvements in space hardware for monitoring human health.