How do plants adapt when they fly into space?
That’s the question the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS) hopes to answer with a novel space experiment taking place Thursday morning, when a UF/IFAS horticultural scientist launches his experiment into suborbital space aboard a Blue Origin New Shepard rocket.
Rob Ferl, director of the University of Florida’s Astraeus Space Institute, will fly on Blue Origin’s spacecraft at 9 a.m. Thursday and conduct the experiment himself. The experiment builds on previous research that showed that a plant species – Arabidopsis thaliana – can detect that it is in space and respond by changing the way its genes are expressed.
“This moment is a milestone not only for the University of Florida and the Astraeus Space Institute, but for an entire community of scientists who can now consider experiments in space that were previously thought impossible,” said Kent Fuchs, UF interim president. “I look forward to cheering Rob on during Thursday’s mission and watching him make history once again.”
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This experiment will determine which genes are turned on and off during different phases of flight. Although much is known about how plants respond to life in space environments such as the International Space Station, researchers know less about how plants respond to space travel at the molecular level. The experiment will provide new insights into how plants adjust their gene expression during the transition from Earth to space.
Plants could one day play an essential role in space exploration as food and air purifiers. Understanding how they respond to the environment in space is the first step toward learning how to grow them effectively there.
“We envision plants keeping us alive in space or on the moon,” said Ferl, who is also associate vice president for UF Research. “What does it take to adapt to life in space? We’d like to know.”
Anna-Lisa Paul, co-leader of the experiment, professor of horticultural sciences and director of UF’s Interdisciplinary Center for Biotechnology Research, said the researchers were only able to see what the plant’s genes were like before and after spaceflight, but not during the flight.
“It’s something that’s outside the evolutionary context of all terrestrial species,” she said. “This is something we’re learning that’s never been done before.”
The research was funded by a grant from NASA’s Flight Opportunities program and the agency’s Division of Biological and Physical Sciences.
Ferl will transport the plants in special tubes called Kennedy Space Center Fixation Tubes (KFTs), which have a piston that releases a preservative solution. The tubes will be attached to the legs of his flight suit with Velcro during the flight. Before and after the flight, they will be transported in special transport bags designed by the UF Space Plants Lab using blackout fabric and a gold thermal blanket.
The experiment has a second purpose: to prove that allowing researchers to conduct their own experiments on flights, rather than relying on unattended experiments or robots, is a good use of research funds. This is the first NASA-supported suborbital flight to be supervised by researchers.
“First-hand experience has a lot to offer,” said Ferl. “The experiment is enriched when a human mind and a human brain are involved.”
The study will look at the plant’s transcriptome, the collection of all expressed RNA that contains answers to which genes are turned on and off to adapt the plant to a space environment. Ferl will chemically “lock” the genes with a preservative solution to stop the plants at different times during launch – just before liftoff, at the beginning of microgravity, at the end of microgravity, and at landing.
The researchers will then sequence the plants’ expressed genes and compare them with a control experiment on Earth to find out exactly which genes were activated or deactivated during the flight.
Jordan Callaham, deputy director of the UF Astraeus Space Institute and research coordinator of the UF Space Plants Lab in the UF/IFAS Division of Horticultural Sciences, said this will help researchers understand how plants would respond to space missions, to the moon or to Mars. But it will also give them a better idea of the basic properties of the chemical processes in plants and how they respond to any new environments.
“We understand at a very basic level how biology responds to space,” said Callaham, who will conduct the control experiment on Earth while Ferl is aboard the Blue Origin rocket.
