Issue link: https://tmcpulse.uberflip.com/i/662005
t m c » p u l s e | a p r i l 2 0 1 6 15 A s the city of Houston approached midnight on March 1, 2016, NASA astro- naut Scott Kelly landed on Earth— in Kazakhstan, to be exact—after having spent the previous 340 days in orbit. It was the longest consec- utive period of time any American had ever been in space, but Scott's mission wasn't just about breaking records. Close to 400 experiments took place during his year on the International Space Station (ISS), with he himself being perhaps the most important of them all. One of NASA's primary objec- tives in Scott's extended deploy- ment was to study the effects of longer duration space travel on the human body with an eye toward future missions, including a human-piloted trip to Mars. To collect the necessary data, Scott underwent extensive medical eval- uations prior to launch, collected frequent samples while aboard the ISS, and is slated to undergo rigor- ous medical assessments now that he has returned to Earth's standard gravitational pull. It's all expected to provide researchers with invalu- able insight into the myriad known and unknown ways weightlessness might influence the interworking of human biological systems, but the experiment has a twist: Scott has an identical twin. Captain Mark Kelly, the elder of the brothers by six minutes, is himself a retired astronaut and has been serving as a control subject here on Earth—undergoing many of the same tests and collecting numerous samples of his own. Of course, Mark isn't a perfect bench- mark: the pair have been eating different diets, engaging in vary- ing levels and types of physical activity, and, at least while Scott was in space, embracing daily routines in stark contrast to one another. Aboard the ISS, Scott's day-to-day was characterized by a regimented schedule in a confined and fixed environment. Mark, on the other hand, spent the past year traveling around the country with his wife, former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords—who sur- vived an assassination attempt in 2011—advocating for gun violence prevention on behalf of their orga- nization Americans for Responsible Solutions. While the customary scientific method may cringe at how seem- ingly unempirical the baseline data might be, the twins' different environments are actually the point. With nearly identical genomes, There have been very few integrated omics studies where you look at the genome, transcriptome, proteome, metabolome and microbiome together, and nobody has ever done this kind of study with twins before. — GRAHAM SCOTT, PH.D. Vice President, Chief Scientist and Institute Associate Director for NSBRI and Associate Professor at Baylor College of Medicine's Center for Space Medicine and Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology scientists have the opportunity to delve into the molecular-level details of the twins' DNA, RNA, proteins and metabolites and tease out genetic changes that may have been caused by spaceflight itself. Essentially, their hope is to answer the age-old question of nature vs. nurture—just, you know, in space. The potential applications won't stop with mankind landing on an asteroid or setting up camp in a Martian crater.