Spaceflight changed the skeletal muscle proteomes of 2 astronauts!

 

A common theme in a lot of serious science fiction is often how life from our planet will need to adapt to the challenges of low or zero gravity. Makes sense, right? Astronauts spend a lot of time recovering after time up on the ISS.

Want to actually understand what is changing?!? Of course you do! 

It is a short read and it has some really optimistic statements, like how exercise can help mediate some of the biggest changes in mitochondria.

This is the journals front page today, btw, which gives some insight into how you actually exercise on the ISS? 

I'd never before heard of this journal before scholar alerted me that someone I follow published something new. Digging into this finds that it's not the first entry. There have been multiple proteomics studies in this journal because - I mean....it's not like being in space for 6 months is altering your DNA a whole lot. Those changes are clearly proteomic! 

Another recent paper looked at similar things to this one, but did it in space mice! 

One reason this multi-omics paper is super cool is that it turns out NASA has a whole data repository of data from organisms that have gone to space. This group took phenotypic data with transcriptomic, proteomic and DNA methylation to better understand muscle loss in mice that spent 30 days in space! 

As an aside, a few years ago I volunteered to help analyze proteomics of Arabidopsis that had went to space. The data hadn't been released yet and I needed to get clearance and the paperwork turned into a hassle for everyone and they dropped it. I have been pretty busy, but I would have found the time for that study - purely and completely so I could make the following joke. 

Space Plants! 

Meh. Maybe some day.