Decoding the impact of spaceflight on cellular programs

Spaceflight represents a major stressor for the human body and the increasing number of missions for space exploration poses an urgent need to understand how spaceflight impacts the astronaut´s body.

The two main environmental stressors are microgravity and space radiation and previous studies have indicated that these two factors affect human and rodent organ gene expression.

This project aims to discover the molecular mechanisms that are affected by spaceflight at spatial cellular level as well as new insights relatively to the human body adaptability leveraging spaceflight as an extreme environment.

We will reveal the detailed molecular alterations induced by space travel on brain and heart by studying unique samples deriving from mice that were exposed to spaceflight on the International Space Station for 41 days.

To this end, we will employ state-of-the-art technologies, i.e., single-cell multiomics and Spatial Transcriptomics, to decode the alterations of the molecular programs caused by permanence in space.

Our integration of molecular approaches will allow us to understand the molecular, anatomical and physiological mechanisms involved in the adaptation and response of mice to a such extreme environment.

Moreover, we will compare the alterations induced by spaceflight on the brain to those present in brains of Parkinson´s Disease mouse models.

In addition, we will investigate the impact of space radiation on the heart by leveraging hearts of mice that were irradiated with 0.5 Gy of Galactic Cosmic Radiation.

The new findings will provide novel and essential knowledge to formulate new and fundamental hypotheses on the human body adaptability opening up new strategies to improve human wellbeing and life quality.