Transcriptional profiling of thymus tissue from rats flown on the SLS-2 mission

The Spacelab Life Sciences (SLS) program was a series of payloads that used the facilities of an entire Spacelab module to conduct a variety of life science investigations. The general objective of the research in the SLS programs was to study the acute and chronic changes that living systems undergo during exposure to the space environment. The specific objective of the Spacelab Life Sciences-2 (SLS-2) mission was to study the structural and functional changes occurring in the bone, muscle, blood, and balance systems of rats in response to space flight. Rats were housed in individual cages in the Research Animal Holding Facility (RAHF) and natural calcium in the food bar was replaced with a non-radioactive calcium isotope (40Ca). The General Purpose Transfer Unit (GPTU) was used to transfer rat cages from the RAHFs to the General Purpose Work Station (GPWS), enabling the crew to perform inflight experiment procedures on the rodents. To this end, a flight group (FLT) of 38-day old male Sprague-Dawley rats were launched from Kennedy Space Center (KSC) on 10/18/1993 and housed in Research Animal Housing Facility (RAHF) on the shuttle for 14 days before being returned alive to Earth. After splashdown, the FLT were decapitated, and dissection occurred on 11/1/1993. Asynchronous ground control animals (GC) were exposed identical environmental conditions as the FLT group except for noise profile, acceleration and vibration. GC animals were housed in SpaceLab-3 (SL-3) simulated cages and dissection occurred on 11/1/1993. Upon dissection, thymus tissues were preserved in liquid nitrogen and stored at -70 C before RNA was extracted. This dataset features 6 FLT and 6 GC biological replicates. In preparation for RNA extraction, thymus tissues were prepared by generating wedge cuts from the top and bottom of the tissue, designated as Cut1 and Cut2. RNA was then extracted from both sets of cuts for all samples. For all FLT and GC samples, purified RNA from Cut2 was selected for library construction. Additionally, purified RNA from Cut1 was also selected for library construction for only one FLT and one GC sample, FLT_F15_Cut1 and GC_G12_Cut1, respectively, which also included four technical replicates (LibRep1-4). All libraries were generated using the QIAseq UPX 3’ Transcriptome kit that enables 3’ gene expression analysis from purified RNA and sequenced around 40 M clusters at SE 93 bp.

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