I’ve been working on a project called Analog2Orbit using public NASA OSDR data, and I’m looking for a few people who might actually want to work on the next stage with me.
The main question is pretty simple: if we learn a molecular response from a ground-based microgravity analog, does that same response show up in real spaceflight?
For the pilot, I built a retina hindlimb-unloading signature entirely from OSD-203, locked the genes/weights/test first, and then projected it into the independent OSD-758 / MHU-8 retina dataset with mice exposed to 0 g, 0.33 g, 0.67 g, and 1 g on the ISS.
A few things came out of it:
- the score decreases monotonically from 0 g → 1 g (Spearman ρ = −0.305, permutation p = 0.073)
- 74% of the top-200 ground genes move in the same direction in the 0 g vs 1 g flight comparison
- the biggest result was temporal: the 7-day ground response partially transfers, the 1-month response reverses direction, and the 4-month response shows very little transfer
So the bigger question I’m interested in now is whether ground analogs reproduce specific biological states rather than one stable “microgravity signature.”
The pilot is fully reproducible and I’m now planning independent flight-side validation and cross-tissue testing. I’m hoping to keep this as a small, serious project group, ideally with people who know rodent analogs/readaptation, spaceflight omics, retina/partial gravity, statistical genomics, or ML.
I’d like to keep leading the computational side and work closely with a senior scientist/researcher on the biology and overall direction.
I attached a short 4-slide summary + one-page brief. If this sounds like something you’d actually want to work on, reply here or message me.
Analog2Orbit_AWG_4slide.pdf (268.0 KB)
Analog2Orbit_one_page.pdf (172.6 KB)