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Biology subjects

Stanbouly, S.

Publications and source records attributed to Stanbouly, S..

2 recordsLinked to original sources

Spaceflight decelerates the epigenetic clock orchestrated with a global alteration in DNA methylome and transcriptome in the mouse retina

Astronauts exhibit an assortment of clinical abnormalities in their eyes during long-duration spaceflight. The purpose of this study was to determine whether spaceflight induces epigenomic and transcriptomic reprogramming in the retina or alters the epigenetic clock. The mice were flown for 37 days in animal enclosure modules on the International Space Station; ground-based control animals were maintained under similar housing conditions. Mouse retinas were isolated and both DNA methylome and transcriptome were determined by deep sequencing. We found that a large number of genes were differentially methylated with spaceflight, whereas there were fewer differentially expressed genes at the transcriptome level. Several biological pathways involved in retinal diseases such as macular degeneration were significantly altered. Our results indicated that spaceflight decelerated the retinal epigenetic clock. This study demonstrates that spaceflight impacts the retina at the epigenomic and transcriptomic levels, and such changes could be involved in the etiology of eye-related disorders among astronauts.

genomics↗

Establishing reference samples for detection of somatic mutations and germline variants with NGS technologies

We characterized two reference samples for NGS technologies: a human triple-negative breast cancer cell line and a matched normal cell line. Leveraging several whole-genome sequencing (WGS) platforms, multiple sequencing replicates, and orthogonal mutation detection bioinformatics pipelines, we minimized the potential biases from sequencing technologies, assays, and informatics. Thus, our \"truth sets\" were defined using evidence from 21 repeats of WGS runs with coverages ranging from 50X to 100X (a total of 140 billion reads). These \"truth sets\" present many relevant variants/mutations including 193 COSMIC mutations and 9,016 germline variants from the ClinVar database, nonsense mutations in BRCA1/2 and missense mutations in TP53 and FGFR1. Independent validation in three orthogonal experiments demonstrated a successful stress test of the truth set. We expect these reference materials and \"truth sets\" to facilitate assay development, qualification, validation, and proficiency testing. In addition, our methods can be extended to establish new fully characterized reference samples for the community.

bioinformatics↗