Hannah Lyons

Yeah, yeah, of course.

So I guess we were interested in this project, like you said, because there's talk about colonising other planets and reproduction is going to be critical for that.

So whether that's from the perspective of our livestock, food management and waste management perspective,

or whether that's actually from human reproduction occurring, it all starts with a sperm and an egg.

And we were really interested in understanding if in space-like environments, especially zero gravity, like you might experience on a spaceship, whether or not sperm would be able to achieve fertilization for an embryo to develop.

Um, so not from complete start to finish.

So they've sent up, um, already pre-fertilized embryos that were made here on earth and sent them up into the international space station and allowed them to develop.

And then they've transplanted those embryos into live animals back here on earth, um, to create babies, but they haven't obviously recreated babies at the ISS and they haven't achieved fertilization in the ISS.

Yes, I believe they had live mouse births from some of those embryos, yeah.

I looked at human sperm, mouse sperm, and pig sperm.

So mouse sperm, it's a easy model that we're already used to working with.

It's quite easily accessible.

Humans, because obviously we wanted to know if humans could reproduce.

And pigs, again, from a livestock perspective and a large domesticated animal.

Yeah, so that was the first major hurdle of the study.

So we partnered with a biotech company here in South Australia who had developed what's called a dual access 3D Clinistar.

So basically it allows us to put small plates on this machine and it'd be constantly rotating to disperse the forces of gravity.

So at no one point is it feeling gravity in any one direction.

So that gave us our zero G microgravity environment.

Yeah.