Comparison of the spaceflight transcriptome of four commonly used Arabidopsis thaliana ecotypes

This experiment compared the spaceflight transcriptomes of four commonly used natural variants (ecotypes) of Arabidopsis thaliana using RNAseq. In nature, Arabidopsis is a native of Europe/Asia/Northwestern Africa and is found across the globe growing in a wide range of environments. The geographical spread of these various populations has led to a slow divergence leading to distinct ecotypes. Understanding the impact of this ecotypic variability is an important factor when using Arabidopsis as a model. Seeds of the ecotypes Col_0, Ler-2, Ws-2 and Cvi-0 were flown to the International Space Station as part of CRS-4 mission in the Biological Research in Canister (BRIC) hardware. The seeds were germinated on orbit, grown for 8 days and then fixed in RNAlater and frozen in the MELFI freezer for return to Earth. Once returned RNA was isolated and RNAseq performed to catalog the transcriptional patterns of the plants grown in space. An identical set of samples were grown in parallel on the ground to provide controls to allow assessment of transcriptional changes specifically associated with the spaceflight environment. This data release includes 48 out of 56 sample expression files with the remaining 8 files to be released at a later date.