Project description:Spaceflight imposes the risk of skeletal muscle atrophy for astronauts. The understanding of muscle atrophy because of spaceflight is limited, but continued efforts are essential for developing countermeasures of this effect. A distinct difference between spaceflight-induced muscle atrophy and other forms of atrophy is the additional effect of cosmic rays in outer space. To study spaceflight-induced muscle atrophy, we performed two ground-based models of microgravity in a low dose radiation environment and studied transcriptional changes in rat soleus muscle using microarray technology.
Project description:Spaceflight and simulated spaceflight microgravity induced osteoarthritic-like alterations at the transcriptomic and proteomic levels in the articular and meniscal cartilages of rodents. But little is known about the effect of spaceflight or simulated spaceflight microgravity on the transcriptome of tissue-engineered cartilage developed from human cells. In this study, we investigate the effect of simulated spaceflight microgravity facilitated by parabolic flights on tissue-engineered cartilage developed from chondrogenically differentiated human bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells obtained from age-matched female and male donors. Our bulk transcriptome data via RNA sequencing demonstrated that the engineered tissues responded to parabolic microgravity in a sex-dependent manner.
