Incredible feat! Scientists witness first-ever healthy mice offspring produced from sperm frozen in ISS

New Delhi: The International Space Station (ISS) has witnessed countless experiments that would help future space missions and also give answers and solutions to the possibility of human habitation in space.

Many experiments conducted over the years during the ISS' reign have churned out incredible facets of space and its ever-metamorphosing dynamics. Be it growing the first flower or vegetables in space, astronauts who have served their time aboard the orbiting laboratory have been a part of amazing revelations.

Now, revealing exciting results of another experiment, scientists have said that freeze-dried sperm stored for over nine months aboard the ISS has yielded healthy mice offspring, for the first time, suggesting that assisted reproduction may be possible for humans living in space in the future.

If humans ever set up space colonies, assisted reproductive technology using preserved sperm samples will be important for producing offspring, researchers said.

However, radiation on the ISS is more than 100 times stronger than that on Earth, and irradiation causes DNA damage in cells.

This has led to concerns that radiation could kill or mutate sperm and pose serious reproductive problems for those travelling in space for extended periods.

Researchers at the University of Yamanashi in Japan fertilised eggs with sperm that had been kept on the ISS for nine months at minus 95 degrees Celsius.

Although the sperm DNA was slightly damaged during space preservation, it could be repaired by the egg and did not impair the birth rate or normality of the offspring, researchers said.

"Our results demonstrate that generating human or domestic animal offspring from space-preserved spermatozoa is a possibility, which should be useful when the space age arrives," researchers said in the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

(With PTI inputs)