Multi-omics Approaches for Understanding Space Flight Impact

Exposure to space flight stressors such as space radiation and altered gravitational field can impact biological systems during missions and throughout an astronaut’s lifetime upon return to Earth. Ambitious long-duration exploration missions to the Moon and Mars are anticipated to push human health risks beyond currently acceptable limits. While these missions may still occur despite these hazards, space agencies have the moral and ethical obligation to provide crew with the best possible estimates of risk to ensure they are adequately informed prior to embarking on space flights that will once again move beyond anything humans have ever accomplished. Therefore, the success of these long-duration space missions depends upon an understanding of the molecular etiologies behind transient and persistent physiological changes induced by space flight, and the subsequent development of protective countermeasures. Characterization of these changes can be challenging due the limited volume of available space flight data and experiments, and the difficulty in recreating space flight conditions on the ground. Despite these challenges, analogs can be leveraged to study the biological impact of the space flight environment. Furthermore, omics-based approaches offer enormous potential to discover unanticipated effects and novel molecular mechanisms, and generate hypotheses to guide targeted experiments. However, use of a single methodology (e.g., whole genomics or transcriptomics) can present limitations and biases in fully characterizing the impact of space flight on biological systems. Integration of multi-omics data in human and animal model studies can provide a holistic and robust understanding of the response of complex biological systems to space flight hazards, and improve discovery power.

The primary objective of this Research Topic is to collect original research, brief research reports, and reviews on the application of multi-omics approaches towards:

1. Understanding the physiological impact of space flight stressors in astronaut samples, terrestrial space analogs, or ground-based space flight simulations
2. Characterizing the individual and interactive impact of space flight stressors
3. Studying the longitudinal impact of space flight across different biological systems and integrating these findings
4. Outlining the benefits and challenges associated with integration of omics data from heterogeneous sources
5. Evaluating current best practices for collection, quality control, analysis, and dissemination of space flight omics data and associated metadata


Please note that Dr. Kothiyal has provided scientific consulting services to Diamond Age Data Science and Scimentis LLC, and founded independent bioinformatics consulting sole-proprietorship (SymbioSeq LLC). The other topic editors declare no competing interests with regard to the Research Topic subject.