The Consortium for Materials Development in Space (CMDS) based at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), has developed the Organic Separation (ORSEP) payload for flight on STS-57. The UAH CMDS is a NASA CCDS.
ORSEP offers the commercial and scientific communities the opportunity to separate cells and particles by a mechanistic technique unavailable on Earth. The potential commercial value of separations includes the opportunity to culture cell subpopulations on return to Earth, the revelation that subpopulations exist and as is the case for protein crystal growth in space, in scientific study of the purified samples.
