Welcome to the "GeneLab Chats" series. In this brief interview style format, GeneLab speaks with authors of GeneLab-enabled publications to better understand the scope of their publication as well as how the GeneLab data system helped enabled their research. Read more information below about the publication highlighted in this series from Dr. Stefania Giacomello at SciLifeLab and KTH Royal Institute of Technology.
For decades, the health risks associated with space exploration have been increasingly documented and characterized. To gain a comprehensive understanding of how spaceflight affects the human body, the molecular responses of the body to spaceflight factors must be robustly profiled. The typical method of omics analyses involved whole tissue processing which has provided much of the known information on tissue-level understanding. With growing ability to perform techniques with higher resolution, such as single cell (sc)RNA-seq and spatially resolved transcriptomics, more information about constituent cell types can be gleaned. A recent publication by Dr Giacomello, "Challenges and Considerations for Single-Cell and spatially resolved transcriptomics sample collection during spaceflight," presents the current status of scRNA-seq datasets (OSD-402, OSD-403, OSD-404, and OSD-405) and spatially resolved transcriptomics datasets obtained from spaceflight samples and discusses the optimal tissue preservation protocols that should be implemented for spaceflight experiments. GeneLab recently spoke to Dr Giacomello about this work and highlights datasets in the GeneLab data systems.
