Transcriptional profiling of thymus tissue from rats flown on the SLS-2 mission

After splashdown, the FLT were decapitated, and dissection occurred on 11/1/1993. Asynchronous ground control animals (GC) were exposed identical environmental conditions as the FLT group except for noise profile, acceleration and vibration. GC animals were housed in SpaceLab-3 (SL-3) simulated cages and dissection occurred on 11/1/1993.

Upon dissection, thymus tissues were preserved in liquid nitrogen and stored at -70 C before RNA was extracted. This dataset features 6 FLT and 6 GC biological replicates. In preparation for RNA extraction, thymus tissues were prepared by generating wedge cuts from the top and bottom of the tissue, designated as Cut1 and Cut2.

RNA was then extracted from both sets of cuts for all samples. For all FLT and GC samples, purified RNA from Cut2 was selected for library construction. Additionally, purified RNA from Cut1 was also selected for library construction for only one FLT and one GC sample, FLT_F15_Cut1 and GC_G12_Cut1, respectively, which also included four technical replicates (LibRep1-4).

All libraries were generated using the QIAseq UPX 3’ Transcriptome kit that enables 3’ gene expression analysis from purified RNA and sequenced around 40 M clusters at SE 93 bp.