Illumina NGS RNA-seq and RRBS Sequencing on Spaceflight Mouse Retina

We reported the retinal transcriptome and methylome profiles of spaceflight and habitat control mice. The retinal transcrtiome was generated including 764 million paired-end 75x2 bp RNA-seq data. The methylome was generated including 788 million 75-bp RRBS DNA methylation data. We identified 177 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) induced by spaceflight based on the RNA-seq dataset, and 643 differentially methylated genes (DMGs) based on RRBS dataset. Functional enrichement analysis based on DEGs and DMGs revealed that spaceflight altered extracellular matrix component (EMC), cell to cell junction, inflammation pathway, wound-healing process, etc. Integration analysis based on transcriptome and methylome suggested that modifications on DNA methylation were correlated with transcriptome changes for several significant biological processes and/or pathways. This study was under the umbrella of the NASA Rodent Research-1 project consortium. In this project, 16-week-old female C57 BL/6J mice were sent to International Space Station (ISS) in NASA's animal enclosure modules (AEM) and were kept inside ISS middeck for 37 days. We used transcrptomic and methylomic approaches to investigated the spaceflight-associated neuro-ocular syndrome (SANS) using retinas from those spaceflight mice.