Niraj Shah

I am Niraj Shah, an independent high-school researcher interested in computational biology, genomics, and muscle physiology. I conducted this project independently using publicly available muscle gene-expression datasets and open-source bioinformatics tools.

My research examines how transcription factors, proteins that regulate gene activity, may differ across muscle atrophy associated with spaceflight, aging, and disuse. I developed the analysis to identify both shared and condition-specific regulatory patterns, using the decoupleR framework to infer transcription-factor activity from gene-expression data.

I am responsible for the study design, data analysis, and manuscript preparation. The article is published open access in PLOS ONE (https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0359659). I am seeking support solely to pay the article processing charge invoiced by PLOS.

September 2026