Meta-analysis of data from spaceflight transcriptome experiments does not support the idea of a common bacterial “spaceflight response”

Abstract

Several studies have been undertaken with the goal of understanding how bacterial transcriptomes respond to the human spaceflight environment. However, these experiments have been conducted using a variety of organisms, media, culture conditions, and spaceflight hardware, and to date no cross-experiment analyses have been performed to uncover possible commonalities in their responses. In this study, eight bacterial transcriptome datasets deposited in NASA’s GeneLab Data System were standardized through a common bioinformatics pipeline then subjected to meta-analysis to identify among the datasets (i) individual genes which might be significantly differentially expressed, or (ii) gene sets which might be significantly enriched. Neither analysis resulted in identification of responses shared among all datasets. Principal Component Analysis of the data revealed that most of the variation in the datasets derived from differences in the experiments themselves.