Adaptive Changes in the Vestibular System of Land Snail to a 30-Day Spaceflight and Readaptation on Return to Earth
Journal: Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience
Year: 2017

The vestibular system receives a permanent influence from gravity and reflexively controls equilibrium. If we assume gravity has remained constant during the species’ evolution, will its sensory system adapt to abrupt loss of that force? We address this question in the land snail Helix lucorum exposed to 30 days of near weightlessness aboard the Bion-M1 satellite, and studied geotactic behavior of postflight snails, differential gene expressions in statocyst transcriptome, and electrophysiologic