Microgravity Omics
Reading astronaut heart tissue at the transcript level, then asking which drugs already on the shelf could hold it together.
Analysing publicly available transcriptomic and multi-omics datasets to investigate the molecular mechanisms underlying cardiac deconditioning during microgravity exposure. The pipeline runs in R — differential gene expression with log2 fold change and adjusted p-values, PCA, and pathway enrichment — to find which systems actually shift in flight.
The point of the analysis is drug repurposing: mapping those disrupted pathways onto existing cardiovascular therapeutics, so a countermeasure for long-duration spaceflight can come from a compound that has already cleared trials rather than one that has to start from zero.
Context
- Mentorship — UBC Computational Biology Lab.
- Collaboration — Zoia Leshchenko, Aaliyah Nwaugo, Sophia Jver, Jade Lai.
- Methods — differential expression, PCA, pathway enrichment, drug-repurposing analysis.