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MOSCOW, October 28 Fertilized quail eggs for sending to the International Space Station and conducting the Quail experiment there to study the effect of weightlessness on the development of embryos will be delivered to Baikonur on November 24 for loading into ship, said leading researcher at the Institute of Biomedical Problems (IMBP) of the Russian Academy of Sciences Tamara Guryeva.
IMBP celebrates its 60th anniversary on October 28, 2023.
“Currently, the equipment for the Quail experiment is ready and it is planned to be sent on December 1, 2023 on the Progress MS-25 cargo ship. Quail eggs will be sent on the same truck. Their delivery to Baikonur is planned on November 24,” — Guryeva said.
She clarified that the eggs will be collected from a specially prepared population of birds, because the experiment requires eggs of the same size and shelf life. Scientists will collect eggs from almost identical quails that are 6-8 months old.
The eggs will be selected for quality: the integrity of their shells and fertilization will be checked using an ovoscope. Then, at the cosmodrome, the eggs will be marked and placed in special containers with cells corresponding to the size of the egg. Before laying, a number from 1 to 24 will be written on the eggs. This is necessary so that the astronauts do not confuse which ones need to be removed at certain stages of the experiment.
According to the program, six eggs will be removed from the incubator on the fourth, seventh, tenth and fifteenth days of development. Quails hatch on the sixteenth day, and each day of hatching is associated with a specific development of the embryo. The resulting material will be delivered to the laboratory for research.
As scientists expect, the results obtained from studies of the development of Japanese quail embryos will become a scientific basis for assessing the degree of dependence of the main life processes of a living organism on the presence of gravity.
Two experiments are planned — one in 2023 and another in 2024.