I’ve been thinking about an interesting direction for a potential Brain AWG project.
What if some of the molecular pathways associated with neurodegeneration aren’t necessarily disease-specific, but instead reflect broader biological stress responses?
I’d like to explore this by comparing publicly available NASA OSDR spaceflight transcriptomic datasets, particularly those involving brain or neural tissues, with molecular profiles of ALS and potentially FTD.
More specifically, I want to investigate:
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Mitochondrial dysfunction: whether spaceflight-associated changes overlap with pathways implicated in neuronal energy metabolism.
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Oxidative stress and proteostasis: whether shared molecular signatures emerge across different biological contexts.
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Neuroinflammation: whether immune-related transcriptional responses show similarities to those observed in neurodegeneration.
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Cross-dataset reproducibility: whether these signatures persist across different experiments, tissues, and biological models.
Methodologically, I’m interested in combining differential expression analysis, pathway enrichment, network reconstruction, and eventually perturbation-informed causal inference to distinguish simple molecular overlap from potentially meaningful regulatory relationships.
The goal would be to develop an open and reproducible computational framework while exploring whether spaceflight biology can offer another perspective on molecular mechanisms relevant to neurodegeneration. (More on the ML and Causal Inference part, although this is just a framework)
Curious if anyone in the group has explored similar directions or knows of OSDR datasets that might be particularly suitable for this!