摘要
Astronauts exhibit an assortment of clinical abnormalities in their eyes during long-duration spaceflight.The purpose of this studywas to determinewhether spaceflight induces epigenomic and transcriptomic reprogramming in the retina or alters the epigenetic clock.The mice were flown for 37 days in animal enclosure modules on the International Space Station;ground-based control animals weremaintained under similar housing conditions.Mouse retinas were isolated and both DNA methylome and transcriptome were determined by deep sequencing.We found that a large number of genes were differentially methylated with spaceflight,whereas there were fewer differentially expressed genes at the transcriptome level.Several biological pathways involved in retinal diseases such as macular degeneration were significantly altered.Our results indicated that spaceflight decelerated the retinal epigenetic clock.This study demonstrates that spaceflight impacts the retina at the epigenomic and transcriptomic levels,and such changes could be involved in the etiology of eye-related disorders among astronauts.
基金
The genomic work carried out at the Loma Linda University Center for Genomics was funded in part by the National Institutes of Health(NIH)(Grant No.S10OD019960)(CW)
the Ardmore Institute of Health(Grant No.2150141)(CW)and Dr.Charles A.Sims’gift to LLU Center for Genomics
This project was partially supported by NASA Space Biology(Grant No.NNX15AE86G)(MDD and XWM)
American Heart Association(AHA)(Grant No.18IPA34170301)(CW)
and also partially supported by NIH grants HL115195-06(HQ)/subcontract(GSU)#SP00013920-02(CW),and HL137962(HQ)/subcontract(GSU)#SP00013696-01(CW).
