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UF Successfully Sends Plants To The International Space Station

SpaceX Headquarters, a 550,000 square foot facility in Hawthorne, California.
SpaceX Headquarters, a 550,000 square foot facility in Hawthorne, California.

On Jan. 10, UF researchers successfully sent plants into space aboard the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

One rocket capsule, Dragon, contained plant experiments from the UF Space Plants Lab. Dragon launched from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and docked to the International Space Station (ISS).

“Watching a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch is awesome,” said Anna-Lisa Paul, one of two principal investigators leading the UF Space Plants lab. “Especially when it is taking your experiment to the ISS.”

Paul, a plant-molecular biologist at UF, has been conducting research in plant-space biology for 20 years alongside her colleague Robert Ferl, who also serves as the co-principal investigator for the UF Space Plants Lab.

Paul and Ferl have sent experiments on seven rockets to space so far, continually testing the responses of plant life to spaceflight in terms of plant-growth rates and patterns of gene expression.

Using a Light Microscopy Module microscope, or LMM, the UF Space Plants team will be able to visualize changes to their plant experiments as the plants orbit the earth on the ISS.

Paul stressed the importance of learning how plant life responds to factors outside of the traditional evolutionary experiences.

“The more we understand about the fundamental mechanisms of how plants sense and respond to their environment, the better prepared we are to deal with adverse situations on earth,” Paul said.

Natasha Sng, a UF Space Plants researcher, started assisting with the lab in 2012. In an email interview conducted from Singapore, where she is spending the spring semester, Sng wrote that the goal of her research was to identify the functions of genes in plants that have a role in spaceflight response.

“The hope is that if we identify the function of a gene that is advantageous for the plants to flourish in space, then perhaps we could use this knowledge to increase the success rate of growing extraterrestrial plants,” Sng wrote.

Eric Schultz, another UF Space Plants researcher, explained how the most  recent space-plants study focused on seeing how plants can adapt to outer space.

“We are seeing what tools they have in their tool belt to use to adapt to this environment they’ve never seen,” Schultz said.

Now that the Dragon capsule has made its successful voyage to the ISS, the experiments for the team at the UF Space Plants Lab can officially begin. Because of past successes working with NASA and SpaceX, Paul said she foresees additional space experiments in the future, including one already scheduled for launch in 2016.

Erica is a reporter who can be contacted by calling 352-392-6397 or emailing news@wuft.org.