Transcriptomic Alterations and RNA-Seq Computational Workflows in Space Biology: A Review of NASA Open Science Frameworks

Abstract

Biological systems exposed to spaceflight environments encounter unique physical stressors, primarily microgravity and ionizing cosmic radiation. Understanding how these factors influence cellular function at the molecular level requires high-throughput sequencing technologies. Transcriptomics, specifically bulk and single-cell RNA-sequencing (RNA-Seq), has become central to characterizing spaceflight-induced gene expression profiles. This paper reviews the end-to-end computational workflows used to process space biology transcriptomic datasets, spanning quality control, read alignment, transcript quantification, and statistical differential expression analysis. Drawing upon the open-access frameworks supported by the NASA Open Science Data Repository (OSDR) and GeneLab for Colleges and Universities (GL4U), we synthesize consistent physiological findings across model organisms, including immune system dysregulation, mitochondrial stress, and DNA damage response activation. Finally, we highlight the pivotal role of open data and reproducible cloud-based computational notebooks in lowering the barriers to space biology research worldwide.