Chris's studies into twin astronauts started about five years ago, with NASA's longest human twin flight mission. Chris remarked that he was honoured to be able to scientifically contribute to this mission.
As a side note, he introduced "chromosome 3 and Brexit" and genetic consequences of social stratification in Great Britain, by discussing how a recent publication related SNPs to election "phenotype". This showed that two SNPs (in two different genes) on chromosome 3 and one on chromosome 20 were found to be related to Brexit voting. In another example, a positive correlation was found between the percentage of fish and chip shops in an area and the percentage of voters for Brexit.
Chris then started to explore his work with NASA on The Twin Study, investigating an extensive range of phenotypes and their relationship with genotype - from vasculature, to cognition, to immune functioning and the microbiome - "some of the best places to look are everywhere you possibly can"! The Kelly twins were the subjects of this study - Scott had been on the ISS for one year, and Mark was on Earth, acting as the "control twin".
Chris shared one of their interesting results, which was that longer telomeres were observed in CD4+ and CD8+ T-cells, detected by qPCR, and this was only at the in-flight timepoint, not upon return to Earth or prior to flight.
Chris then described "breaking out the [nanopore] long reads", explaining how read mapping can be a challenge in short-read sequencing, especially when there are repeat sequences, which are characteristic of telomeres (TTAGGG). He introduced EdgeCase - an open source analysis software that he used to quantify the length of telomeres, and map them to the genome. Haplotypes could also be distinguished thanks to the long reads. The results were verified against Genome in a Bottle (GIAB) data.
He then displayed a line up of 5-8 kb telomere sequences, that had been measured in the long-read sequencing data, showing how telomeres were longer for the in-flight timepoint. In fact, these observations were published by media outlets, stating how space had made Scott "taller and younger"!
So what now? Chris shared that he will be looking everywhere at telomeres - investigating telomere sequence length in those involved in climbing Everest, going to Mars, and in the extreme microbiome project.
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