Spaceflight has diverse impacts on the human body. But due to the complexity of biological data, these changes are sometimes difficult to detect. Thus, in this study, network analysis is used to uncover important hub genes affected by short duration spaceflight to civilians. Differentially expressed genes from the transcriptome profiles of the Inspiration4 mission crew members were mapped in a network. And through degrees and centrality measures, hub genes were identified. Functional enrichment analysis (FEA) was done hereafter to understand their biological functions and were validated with other datasets in SOMA. Results uncovered eight hub genes namely UBA52, FAU, RACK1, RPS2, RPS11, RPS14, RPS15 and RPL35. FEA showed that these hub genes were all linked to ribosomal function. SOMA validation revealed that these ribosomal protein genes show consistent altered gene expression during spaceflight, suggesting potential links to interference in ribosome biogenesis and protein synthesis. These findings can help future studies in understanding the effect of spaceflight on humans.

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