NASA Postdoctoral Program Opportunities

While ionizing radiation is known to be deleterious to human health, the effects of non-ionizing radiation and the absence of Earth’s ambient electromagnetic field in space is not as well understood. The objective of this work is to investigate the effects of time-varying, non-ionizing electromagnetic field on human physiology, particularly cardiovascular health. A time series analysis of correlations between variations in the earth’s electromagnetic spectrum and in the heart rate variability of human volunteers will be conducted.  Correlations between electromagnetic variations and Omics data, such as gene expression data (i.e. RNA amplitude and timing of expression during the redox cycle) and metabolome data (i.e. Oxygen consumption and ATP production) will also be investigated. Programming scripts will be developed to perform dynamic custom queries on large databases of environmental and physiological data, which will have broad applications for studies of spaceflight data. 

 

This opportunity is complementary to the NASA peer-review selected Space Biology Research Proposal entitled "Electromagnetic basis of metabolism and heredity" (http://www.nasa.gov/directorates/heo/slpsra/20130529_spacebio_nraawards.html), which is based on a breakthrough discovery about the temporal coordination of fundamental biochemical reactions in living cells, which are maintained by the sequential transfer of electrons in reduction-oxidation reactions. This “redox cycle” (also called the metabolic cycle) is known to control all cellular responses to environmental factors, including those caused by oxidation-induced stress that can result in cancer. In fact, the redox cycle is the fundamental biochemical process that controls the timing of all biochemical reactions in living cells, including energy production, RNA transcription, and DNA replication. Through this temporal coordination chemical conflict between the reductive and oxidative reactions is avoided. At the same time the coherent or interfering transfer of energy is enabled between the ambient natural electromagnetic (EM) field and living cells.  

 

Many complex diseases likely involve environmental contributions that can be difficult to assess

because the timing of such perturbations relative to the oxidative vs. reductive phase can have opposite effects. The proposed work will investigate environmental variables that can modulate the timing of the biochemical redox cycle by a feedback mechanism at the electron transport chain and thereby modulate heredity via induced oxidation of the genome by thermodynamic coupling below thermal noise.