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Spring 2024

We are absolutely thrilled to announce that 2024 has started off with a bang! It's been exhilarating so far, with an abundance of exciting developments and announcements in the last three months. So come check it out and stay tuned for more incredible updates and adventures ahead!

2024 AWG Symposium

Spanning two days, from May 1 - 2, 2024, the annual Analysis Working Group (AWG) Symposium showcased the outstanding space biology science stemming from the AWG community. Under the overarching theme of "Bridging Space Biology and Advanced Technologies," this event featured keynote addresses from Shawna Pandya, Kellie Gerardi, and Chris Sembroski, along with scientific presentations from the AWG community. In case you missed this event, don't worry, we've got you covered. Watch the recordings now!

View the agenda to help you navigate which recording to watch, or watch them all!

New Visualization Apps Available Now!

The OSDR team developed new visualization applications! Thes apps are able to provide information and improve analysis needs in space biology research and they include the Multi-Study Visualization Platform, the Environmental Data Application, and the RadLab Portal and RadLab Data API.

2023 Analysis Working Group Workshop Report

Open Science Data Repository team hosted the 2023 Analysis Working Group (AWG) Workshop on November 14-15, 2023 at the Capital Hilton in advance of ASGSR. The first day of the workshop was organized into three sessions:

Session 1 focused on collecting feedback from the AWG community on user acceptance on current OSDR development within four specific topics.
Session 2 provided specific trainings on approaches to using OSDR data with a focus on four specific topics.
Session 3 provided the leads an opportunity to open dialogue within each AWG about their community’s future, how to meet the objectives of the 2023-2032 Decadal Survey, and to develop new projects/collaborations.

Discussions from all the sessions were captured and used to create a workshop report which is available for you to read now.

OSDR-Enabled Publications

It’s been only four months since the New Year and there are already 4 new OSDR-enabled publications! Check out these latest publications and more on the OSDR publications list.

Spaceflight changes gut barrier-associated gene expression patterns in astronauts and mice

Akinsuyi O S, Xhumari J, Ojeda A, Roesch L F W, (2024). Gut permeability among Astronauts during Space missions, Life Sciences Space Research. doi.org/10.1016/j.lssr.2024.03.003

Datasets: OSD-247, OSD-249, OSD-466, OSD-530, OSD-667

Detection of differentially expressed genes using machine learning and artificial intelligence

Okwori M and Eslami A, (2024). Feature engineering from meta-data for prediction of differentially expressed genes: An investigation of Mus musculus exposed to space-conditions, Computational Biology and Chemistry. doi.org/10.1016/ j.compbiolchem.2024.108026

Datasets: OSD-47, OSD-98, OSD-100, OSD-101, OSD-102, OSD-103, OSD-104, OSD-105, OSD-168, OSD-242

Effects of prolonged elevated radiation on DNA methylation patterns

Perdyan A, Jakalski M, Horbacz M, Beheshti A, Mieczkowski J, (2024). Chromosomal positioning and epigenetic architecture influence DNA methylation patterns triggered by galactic cosmic radiation, Scientific Reports. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-51756-7

Datasets: OSD-80, OSD-109, OSD-117, OSD-159, OSD-203, OSD-294, OSD-317, OSD-530

S. aureus metabolism and virulence alteration in space environment

Hauserman M R, Ferraro M J, Carroll R K, Rice K C, (2024). Altered quorum sensing and physiology of Staphylococcus aureus during spaceflight detected by multi-omics data analysis, npj Microgravity. doi: 10.1038/s41526-023-00343-7

Datasets: OSD-145, OSD-500

Precision Medicine World Conference (PMWC) 2024

With just under 1000 people in attendance, Dr. Sylvain Costes and Ryan Scott represented the NASA OSDR team at PMWC on January 24-26 in Santa Clara, CA.

The meeting brings together physicians, scientists, commercial biotechnologists, and data scientists on advances tied to precision medicine. Dr. Sylvain Costes was invited to speak by PMWC organizers, and presented both NASA OSDR as well as two relevant Nature Machine Intelligence publications in 2023, one focused on precision health and AI, and the other on space biological research and AI.

The presentation was attended by 35 attendees. NASA and OSDR were well received during the talk and the PMWC event overall. Several attendees are already collaborators in the spaceflight biology and health field, notably the Animal Analysis Working Group Chair for OSDR, Dr. Tejaswini Mishra of Stanford. Ryan was able to make links to several new researchers and leaders at NIH, the US Navy, and the International Cancer Genome Consortium, all of whom were excited to learn about the advances of NASA space life sciences.

Space Health and Space Biology Symposium

On February 8th, University of California’s Space Health and NASA’s Biological and Physical Sciences co-hosted the first hybrid Space Health and Space Biology Symposium at the University of California San Francisco’s (UCSF) Mission Hall. With 35 online and 60 in-person attendees, the event was moderated by Aenor Sawyer, MD, MS (UCSF Health) and initiated with opening remarks by Vice Chancellor Hal Collard, PhD (UCSF). The hour and a half long event consisted of four scientific presentations from the presenters below and was followed by a hour long combined Q+A and networking event.

Sonja Schrepfer, MD, PhD (UCSF)—Immunoscenescence on the ISS: It never gets old!
Sylvain Costes, PhD (NASA)—NASA Open Science Data Repository for Space Biology and Health Research
Keith Siew, PhD (University of College London)—Cosmic Kidney Disease: An Integrated Pan-Omic, Physiological, and Imaging Study into the Renal Health Consequences of Spaceflight
Charles Chiu, MD, PhD (UCSF)—Metagenomics in Space—and in Pandemics

Of note, Dan Kingsley of SKS Partners was in attendance, and has provided support for the Berkeley Space Center. In the fall of 2023, a joint venture between UC Berkeley and SKS Partners was announced to unveil the formation of the Berkeley Space Center at NASA Ames Research Center’s Research Park. This venture is aimed at leveraging the area’s existing innovation ecosystem, fostering deeper collaborations between private, academic, and government sectors to launch technological breakthroughs in astronautics, quantum computing, climate studies, and the social sciences.

This symposium is an exciting collaborative effort that is paving the way for increased collaboration between UC Space Health, NASA, and other space entities, and is the first of many future events.

NASA 2024 Human Research Program Investigator's Workshop

The Human Research Program (HRP) Investigators’ Workshop (IWS) was held on February 13-16, 2024 in Galveston, TX. There were over 600 presentations and over 2600 attendees!

The OSDR team showcased some groundbreaking presentations which included:

"The NASA Open Science Data Repository: Biomedical FAIR Data, Analysis Tools, User Communities, Publications, and Discoveries for Deep Space Missions," presented by Ryan Scott.
"Biological Research and Space Health Enabled by Machine Learning to Support Deep Space Missions," presented by Sylvain Costes.
"Enabling Model Organism and Commercial Astronaut Data Access Through the NASA Open Science Data Repository," poster presented by Amanda Saravia-Butler.
"RadLab: Graphical and Programming Interfaces for Interrogation of Space Telemetry Data," poster presented by Kirill Grigorev.
"The NASA Biological Institutional Scientific Collection (NBISC): Tissue and Microbe Biospecimens to Advance Space Research," poster presented by Sigrid Reinsch.

Year of Open Science Culminating Conference

Thank you to all those that attended! Representatives from different organizations presented their work during the two days of the conference, highlighting past, present, and future work done to promote Open Science. Presenters covered topics on policy, community-building, rewards, and incentives, as well as infrastructure, tools, and technology for Open Science.

On the second day of the conference, Dr. Lauren M. Sanders presented her talk on “Open Science Data for Space Biology and Health Research.” Lauren highlighted NASA’s efforts on Open Science, specifically, how the OSDR is used to make science accessible to all and how it enables computational advances. Lauren also talked about the formation of the Analysis Working Groups (AWGs) and how they work to promote scientific innovation, the open data and analytics tools available on the OSDR website such as the data submission portal and the interactive visualization platforms, and NASA’s Open Science initiative in developing training programs for educators and students using open data and open science practices.

If you registered but could not make it to all the talks, recordings are available!

OSDR Participates in NASA's SMD 2024 AI workshop

The NASA Science Mission Directorate (SMD) AI Workshop 2024 was recently held in Huntsville, Alabama and brought together a distinguished panel of more than 100 AI experts and scientists from outside and within the agency to delve into the future of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for space exploration and open science.

Dr Sylvain Costes Presents at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR)

Dr Sylvain Costes had the privilege of reviewing the impact of scientific and technological advances on radiation oncology with discussion centered on the challenges and opportunities in patient care through multi-omics approaches.

In his presentation, Dr. Costes showcased the pioneering Artificial Intelligence (AI) initiatives being propelled by the vast array of standardized omics and phenotypic data available in the NASA Open Science Data Repository . This AI research has been primarily supported by NASA Science Mission Directorate (SMD) and is co-led by Dr. Lauren Sanders, Project Scientist for OSDR and leader of the AI4LS working group (AI for Life in Space). One of the key features of his talk was CRISP v1.1, an AI tool developed by the NASA FDL 2020 Astronaut Healt h challenge. CRISP v1.1 is designed for generating synthetic causal Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) data, with properties typical of cancer and biological datasets, enabling data agnostic causal discovery across heterogeneous data. For more information on CRISP v1.1 and its applications, please view the detailed overview here. The AI4LS team has been utilizing CRISP v1.1 to examine the relationship between gene expression and lipid content in the livers of space-flown mice, suggesting that spaceflight may induce changes in the liver similar to those seen in the onset of diseases such as NAFLD (non-alcoholic fatty liver disease).

New Series - Success Stories

Welcome to the “Open Science Success Stories”. These short narratives showcase insights garnered from interviews with members of the AWG community who have utilized Open Science datasets as a catalyst for advancing their careers in the field of space biology. Listen to the latest interview with Henry Cope, PhD student from the University of Nottingham.

Watch Series

Latest GeneLab Chats

Check out the latest releases of GeneLab Chats on our YouTube channel!

Dr. Amanda Saravia-Butler - Batch effect correction methods for NASA GeneLab transcriptomic datasets and the effectiveness of Open Science data systems and Analysis Working Groups (AWGs) in research.

Dr. Thomas Cahill - Radio-protective effects of hibernation-like states using zebrafish as a model organism in comparison to the space-flown mouse studies of OSD-47.

Dr. John Z Kiss - The value of analogue experiments in comparison to space flight experiments available from the Open Science data repository.

Watch Series

Workflows for Processing Microarray Data

Microarray technology enables simultaneous analysis of thousands of genes, facilitating understanding of complex diseases and molecular responses to environmental factors such as microgravity in space biology experiments. Recently, GeneLab has wrapped the Microarray Affymetrix processing pipeline and the Microarray Agilent 1-channel processing pipeline into Nextflow workflows.

NASA Space Life Sciences Library (NSLSL) Now Available

The NASA Space Life Sciences Library (NSLSL), co-founded by NASA’s Biological and Physical Sciences division and Kennedy Space Center, provides consolidated global space life sciences literature into a single database to support research that addresses the effects of the space environment on biological systems. The purpose of this resource is to enhance the findability and accessibility of content including peer-reviewed articles, technical publications, dissertations, and patent publications through a central repository.

Plant Reactome Visualization App

The Plant Reactome is an all-inclusive resource of plant pathways for basic research, genome analysis, pathway modeling, systems biology, and education. This is an open-source, open access, manually curated and peer-reviewed pathway database with the goals of conveying the rich information in the visual representations of plant pathways in a detailed, computationally accessible format.

NASA's Spaceflight Technology, Applications, and Research Program

Spaceflight Technology, Applications and Research (STAR) is a virtual NASA program for space biosciences training. The annual course targets principal investigators (PIs), senior research scientists, and postdoctoral scholars and aims to facilitate their entry to space biology and preparation for conducting spaceflight experiments using NASA and commercial platforms. Open for applications until June 28, 2024.

Apply and Learn More

COSPAR 2024

Come check out OSDR's Sylvain Costes at COSPAR which will be held on July 13 - 21, 2024 in Korea. Sylvain will be the first speaker in the Interdisciplinary Lecture Session!

ASGSR 2024

Abstract submissions for the 2024 ASGSR annual conference are now being accepted. Each year the ASGSR annual conference brings together the biological and physical space sciences community to share research, build collaborations, and discuss emerging issues in the field. ASGSR welcomes scientists and engineers from all career stages to Puerto Rico from December 3-7, 2024 at the Sheraton Puerto Rico Resort & Casino.

Latest Data Releases

Since the start of 2024, a total of 16 transcriptomic, 1 genomic, and 2 proteomic/metabolomic, GeneLab datasets have been added to the Open Science Data Repository this year.

To ensure omics data hosted on the GeneLab Data Repository are accessible to and interpretable by a broad scientific audience GeneLab collaborated with our AWG scientific community to develop and standardize consensus processing pipelines for each omics data type. Standardizing pipelines is necessary to minimize variation in data processing, which enables the integration of data from the diverse array of spaceflight and analog experiments hosted on GeneLab. View the latest 12 processed datasets.

Since January 2023, 5 ALSDA (pheno-physiological-behavioral-imaging) datasets have been released. A sampling of these datasets include: behavioral video from drosophila aboard the International Space Station; immunostaining microscopy of the retinal-blood barrier from RR9; muscle calcium uptake data from spectrofluorometry RR1 and RR9; echocardiogram-ultrasound data from mice exposed to low-dose oxygen ions and protons; and so much more. These first-to-be-released pheno-physio datasets enable multi-hierarchical analytics between the molecular genomic level to the tissue, organ, system, and whole organismal behavioral levels. Sincerest appreciation to the 100+ ALSDA AWG members who provided feedback on assay metadata and tabular/imaging data standards enabling scientific.

This brings the grand total to 489 datasets in the repository!