Fig. 6: Blood Brain Barrier integrity markers in spaceflight.

a Abundance of blood-brain barrier (BBB) integrity peptides in plasma of i4 astronauts shown as violin plots. Data is from n = 4 astronauts. Each blood proteomic measurement was performed in two technical replicates per astronaut and timepoint. Displayed data represents the average of the technical replicates which were further averaged at the indicated condition (preflight, and long-term postflight). Boxes show the quartiles of the dataset while the whiskers extend to show the rest of the distribution except for “outliers”. b Representative images of hippocampal PECAM-1 in the flight (FLT) and ground control (GC) mice (n = 5). PECAM-1 positive cells were identified based on red fluorescence, while endothelium was stained with lectin (green). The nuclei were counterstained with DAPI (blue). In the control hippocampal region, few positive cells were found. In the hippocampal region of FLT mice, enhanced PECAM expression could be detected. There was a significant difference between FLT and GC groups with p < 0.05 (n = 5 replicates, two-sided Student’s paired t-Test, p = 0.023).Source data are provided as a Source Data file. Scale bar = 50 mm.