Analysis of femurs from mice embarked on board BION‐M1 biosatellite reveals a decrease in immune cell development, including B cells, after 1 wk of recovery on Earth

What is it about?

During spaceflight, astronauts undergo numerous physiological modifications threatening their health and performance. In particular, modifications of the immune system represent a major risk to crewmembers during deep-space missions. A better understanding of immune system response to weightlessness is therefore required. To date, such studies have focused on cell-mediated immunity and T lymphocytes, while data on humoral immunity (B lymphocytes and antibodies) are scarce. To fill this gap, we have analysed the set of proteins expressed by the femur (proteome) collected from mice of the Bion-M1 space mission. We observed that expression levels of a number of proteins involved in the development of immune cells were lower in the femur of mice that were allowed to recover for one week after a full month in space, compared to mice not allowed to recover. The same observation was made concerning the number of B lymphocytes in the bone marrow and spleen of Bion-M1 animals. Altogether, these data indicate a reduction of immune cell development, including B cells, one week after landing. Such observations may contribute to explain higher susceptibility to infection, despite the fact that we noted that flown mice were still able to mount a humoral immune response.

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