Abstract
Life aboard spacecraft poses various dangers to astronaut health, with hazards including microgravity, radiation, and enclosed spaces. Research into mitigating these health issues includes analysis of the transcriptome of rodents sent to the International Space Station. This project investigates the effects of spaceflight on the gene expression of mammary tissue of female mice of two age groups, 10-12 and 32 weeks, in order to assess the impact of age and spaceflight on gene expression. Spaceflight-induced changes to gene expression in rodent mammary tissue could contribute to the characterization of the impact of spaceflight on female astronaut health, which has been historically underserved. Analysis of the OSD-511 dataset from NASA’s Open Science Data Repository utilized a containerized implementation of their RNA-Seq pipeline on the San José State University High Performance Computing Cluster. Seven genes were found to be differentially expressed across all comparison groups; one gene, Greb1, is implicated in hormone mediated disease. Age appears to influence biological pathways affected by spaceflight in mammary tissue, with young mice experiencing metabolic changes while older mice undergo changes to inflammatory pathways. Further research is needed to determine the mechanism of spaceflight-induced gene expression changes.