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For more than 50 years, humans have been fascinated by the idea of exploring the cosmos, sending astronauts to the moon and the International Space Station in low earth orbit.
But all that space travel comes at a cost. The microgravity environment appears to impact the human body, affecting the brain, heart, muscle and bone mass, and the eyesight of astronauts. But because so few people have been to space, little is known about the full extent of these troubling symptoms or what drives them into the body.
To try to understand what exactly is going on in the astronauts’ bodies, more than 200 scientists have combined their efforts and data to generate the largest set of biological space-related data ever produced. Together, they identified a common thread behind all the changes that occur in the human body due to time in space: mitochondrial dysfunction.
Their work was published Wednesday in a series of articles in the journal Cell and in affiliated magazines.
Afshin Beheshti is co-author and researcher and bioinformatician at NASA for the GeneLab project. He says Reverse part of the reason he was so curious about the biological effects of space is because there are so many unknowns.
Studying the effects of space flight on the human body is challenging: few people have ventured into space, so there are a limited number of people participating in the research, and sending samples into space for future analysis is also difficult and expensive. That’s why scientists turned to each other for help.
The researchers used data from experiments that involved sending mice to the International Space Station and observing any changes in their health compared to control mice on Earth. They also used data collected during NASA’s infamous Twin Study, in which NASA astronaut Scott Kelly spent nearly a year on the space station while his identical twin Mark Kelly remained on the ground.
They also took physiological data from 59 astronauts, as well as data from blood and urine samples collected from dozens of other astronauts over the years as part of NASA’s GeneLab.
To the question that Besheti and his colleagues tried to answer: “Is there a master switch that could change your entire body in space?”
From the data they collected, the scientists noticed a common thread: changes in mitochondrial activity. Mitochondria are a kind of molecule that acts as power plants for the cells in our body. They are essentially a digestive system for cells and break down nutrients for energy. It wasn’t what scientists expected, Beheshti says, but it coincides with past research.
“As we continued to analyze, some biological patterns kept popping up,” says Beheshti. “The mitochondria were amazing because they weren’t right on my radar, but they connect a lot of these things together.”
The study suggests that mitochondrial stress – which affects how cells get energy – leads to changes in gene regulation, metabolism, and immune systems in both mice and humans after spending time in space. It could be the root cause of symptoms as diverse as bone problems, vision problems and muscle wasting, the study suggests. There are also some indications that changes in mitochondria are also linked to increased oxidative stress, according to the study.
But the scientists behind the research are still unsure whether the changes occur as a result of another process – some kind of domino effect – or whether the mitochondria themselves triggered all the other changes in the body. Beheshti has his suspicions.
“In my opinion, it’s an effect,” says Beheshti. “You go through a hyper-gravity effect, you go through the stress that happens, and once it’s stabilized, something could change right away.”
“I guess this mitochondrial dysfunction is a cumulative effect of all the changes,” he adds.
Now that scientists have identified mitochondria as a common theme, the next step is to find ways to mitigate mitochondrial changes to protect the health of astronauts in space.
Abstract: Spaceflight is known to impose changes to human physiology with unknown molecular etiologies. To reveal these causes, we used a multi-omics systems biology analytical approach using biomedical profiles of fifty-nine astronauts and data from NASA’s GeneLab derived from hundreds of samples flown into space to determine transcriptomic, proteomic, metabolomic and epigenetic responses. to space flight. Overall pathway analyzes on multi-omics datasets showed significant enrichment for mitochondrial processes, as well as innate immunity, chronic inflammation, cell cycle, circadian rhythm, and olfactory functions. Importantly, NASA’s Twin Study provided a platform to confirm many of our main findings. Evidence of impaired mitochondrial function and DNA damage was also found in metabolic urine and blood data compiled by the astronaut cohort and data from the NASA twin study, indicating mitochondrial stress as a coherent phenotype of space flight.
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