# Gut microbes shift x Brain neuroinflammation | Inferred Serum Layer

**URL:** <https://awg.osdr.space/t/gut-microbes-shift-x-brain-neuroinflammation-inferred-serum-layer/4829>\
**Category:** AWG Discussions\
**Created:** [November 3, 2026, 3:56pm UTC](https://awg.osdr.space/t/gut-microbes-shift-x-brain-neuroinflammation-inferred-serum-layer/4829 "2026-11-03T15:56:41Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![mianqasim](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex001/user_avatar/awg.osdr.space/mianqasim/32/4557_2.png) [@mianqasim](https://awg.osdr.space/u/mianqasim)\
**Post date:** [November 3, 2026, 3:56pm UTC](https://awg.osdr.space/t/gut-microbes-shift-x-brain-neuroinflammation-inferred-serum-layer/4829/1 "2026-11-03T15:56:41Z")

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Hi all, we’re Qasim and Anayah, AL students. We’re planning a secondary analysis and would like expert feedback on the design before going further. [@BrainAWG](https://awg.osdr.space/groups/brainawg) @izza.effendi

Idea: OSDR has gut microbiome and brain transcriptome data from spaceflight mice, but from different missions. We want to test whether the gut shifts, through a literature-based pathway, predict the direction of change in a fixed panel of neuroinflammation/BBB genes in the brain datasets.

Plan (group-level only, no claim of paired animals):

- Guild-level gut changes (flight vs ground) within each dataset, with guilds defined in advance from taxonomy and function.
- An inferred circulating-molecule layer: candidate molecules, expected direction only, with citations and confidence ratings. We haven’t found measured serum data for these missions, so it is clearly labelled as inferred.
- A gene panel and predicted directions before scoring against brain data, compared against shuffled-link and generic-inflammation baselines. Hypothesis-generating only.

Data: gut OSD-249 and OSD-466; brain OSD-612, OSD-613, OSD-352 and OSD-682 (WT, drug-free animals only). Groups are small, about 3-9 mice.

Status: datasets curated, per-dataset gut analysis done, guild scheme under revision. Serum layer and brain test not done.

We’d most value:

- Measured serum, plasma or metabolite data for these missions that we’ve missed.
- Any gut and brain datasets from the same animals.
- Published work on this that we should read.
- Someone willing to sanity-check our method to go about the guild construction and categorization.  
We had approached the guild categorization first by extracting the most changed taxa and then categorizing them based on their functions. However, we can also do this by reversing the steps and categorizing all the bacteria recorded into pre-defined guilds, and calculating the directional change based on this. So we would of course love to hear from someone with more expertise on how to approach the guild categorization and virtual serum layer.

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**Author:** ![VanessaMontiel](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex001/user_avatar/awg.osdr.space/vanessamontiel/32/3858_2.png) [@VanessaMontiel](https://awg.osdr.space/u/VanessaMontiel)\
**Post date:** [November 4, 2026, 8:52pm UTC](https://awg.osdr.space/t/gut-microbes-shift-x-brain-neuroinflammation-inferred-serum-layer/4829/2 "2026-11-04T20:52:22Z")

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[vaaneehmr@gmail.com](mailto:vaaneehmr@gmail.com)