Fish mating experiment in space--what it aimed at and how it was prepared.

The code name 'MEDAKA' was given to the fish experiment in the IML-2 (the second International Microgravity Laboratory), a Space-shuttle mission (STS-65) carried out in July 1994. Medaka is the Japanese name for a small fresh-water fish, Oryzias latipes. This experiment titled 'Mating behavior of the fish Medaka and development of their eggs in space' aimed to present data for designing the future fish-culture in space. The Medaka experiment accomplished its objectives to the point of 100%. The fish mated, laid eggs in space, and these eggs developed normally to hatching (coming out as a baby fish) under microgravity. Its success totally depended on selection of the four fish sent to space. This paper describes the aims of the IML-2 Medaka fish experiment and how it was prepared, together with a brief report on what were achieved in space.     

Most of it started with T4 phage and was then taken over

Professor Fumio Arisaka is one of the famous leaders in bacteriophage research, especially in the areas of protein biophysics and structural biology. Autonomous phage morphogenesis is a self-assembly process controlled by subunit–subunit interaction. Under this principle, Fumio has studied T4 tail assembly and morphology. He has also contributed structural information about T4 phage through a combination of X-ray structural analysis and three-dimensional image reconstruction using cryo-electron microscopy. Most of the development of ultracentrifugation applications for molecular assembly and phage morphogenesis research was also performed in Fumio’s laboratory. Fumio is a pioneer of supramolecular protein assembly study, and his science continues in the research work of the approximately 150 people who had attended his final lecture at the Tokyo Institute of Technology.