A University of Florida (UF) biologist will travel to suborbital space next Thursday on a Blue Origin mission to study how plants adapt and respond to new environments and modify their gene expression, especially during flight.
This is a new space experiment that biologist Rob Ferrell, director of the Asterius Space Institute at the University of Florida, will perform as an astronaut on the New Shepard rocket from Jeff Bezos's space company Blue Origin.
The NS-26 mission is scheduled to launch on Thursday from Blue Origin Spaceport in Texas, carrying six people: Nikolina Elrich, Eugene Green, Iman Jahangir, Carson Kitchen, Ephraim Rabin and the aforementioned NASA horticultural scientist. UF/IFAS.
The experiment builds on previous research that showed that a plant species, Arabidopsis thaliana, can detect its presence in space and then modify the way its genes are expressed, UF said in a statement.
Although it is widely known how plants respond to spaceflight environments, such as on the International Space Station (ISS), researchers have much less knowledge about how plants respond at the molecular level when traveling into space.
Professor Werl's experiment will therefore “provide new data on how plants modify gene expression as they travel from Earth to space,” the academic institution highlighted.
In this sense, Verl and Anna-Lisa Paul, the second principal investigator of the experiment, stressed that until now, the genes of this plant could only be observed before and after the space flight, not during it. Hence the importance of this experiment.
Moreover, in the future, plants could play a key role in space exploration, “providing food and purifying the air,” he said, noting that understanding how they interact with the space environment is the first step in learning how to grow them effectively in space.
“We expect plants to keep us alive in space or on the moon,” said Verl. “We would like to know what it takes to adapt to living in space.”
This is an experiment “outside the evolutionary environment of any terrestrial species,” explained Paul, a research professor of horticulture at the University of Florida, so “we are learning.”
“No such research has ever been done,” the scientist said.
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