Dr. Willian da Silveira: The Mitochondria as a Central Hub for Spaceflight Impact

The Bioinformatics and Beyond Podcast

In this episode we begin discussing the biology of spaceflight with Dr. Willian da Silveira. We start by hearing the story of how Dr. da Silveira's recent high profile space omics paper (https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(20)31461-6.pdf) came to be. He first describes the NASA GeneLab and how he got involved, and how his story of this paper began with an analysis of some liver transcriptomics data. We hear about all the different types of data used in this study, including epigenetics and metabolomics data. Dr. da Silveira discusses how to try to incorporate and work with this many types of data all at the same time. He then further elaborates and explains data like epigenetics and metabolomics.

After discussing all the different types of data, and how to try to analyze all the data together, Dr. da Silveira talks more about the biological side of some of the data, for instance discussing rodent data and human cell lines. Finally, we discuss the results of his paper and how all the data analysis point to a central hub of the impact of spaceflight, with mitochondrial stress acting as this central hub. We conclude with a discussion of the principal risks to humans when they go to space and what Dr. da Silveira sees coming for the future of space omics research.

Link to Dr. da Silveira's recent publication: https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(20)31461-6.pdf

Link to spaceflight impact review paper mentioned: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33242416/