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Plants are very important to space flight success
for a number of reasons.
One is that, you know that when we leave earth's orbit
in any kind of capacity, we'll take plants with us.
I mean, they're part
of our exploration heritage, if you will.
That's they do things for us from the perspective
that they recycle all of the things that we don't use,
and they provide things that we do use,
they use our carbon dioxide that we get rid of,
they recycle our water, recycle our air, and, of course,
they provide us food in terms
of carbohydrates that they metabolize.
But also, plants are important
because they give us some insights
into the fundamental nature of what we would call eukaryotes,
or, or higher organisms, because plants, just like people,
are what we call higher organisms, and so learning a lot
about the metabolism of plants, in sort of an easy environment,
also tells us things about ourselves.
A lot of the research that we, and others have done
for space flight, and also
for what we call closed system ecologies
for advanced life support systems and things, you now see,
especially in things like closed environments and greenhouses,
so some of the technologies that have been developed
for growing plants in a colony
or in a space station are now used in commercial greenhouses
to make them more efficient, to save time and resources,
and of course, on Earth, money.
One of the things that is particularly nice,
for my colleague Rob Ferl and I, is that we've been
in the space flight business for a little while now and what
that has allowed us to do is
to treat the space flight environment
like any other terrestrial environments in a way,
because the scientist explores an environment,
you ask how your plants, or whatever, are responding
to that environment and then you test a hypothesis,
get those answers, form another hypothesis on the basis of that,
and, and so on and so forth.
Our access to the space station and also the space shuttle,
back in the day, has allowed us
to do keep this continuity going.
Our very first space flight experiment was on the shuttle,
STS-93, and it allowed us to answer one particular question,
we took that answer and we put that up on the space station.
And that allowed us to answer another set.
The examples that came back
from that experiment now have allowed us
to develop another set of experiments that will go
up on SpaceX 3, and so, having this continuity
and having the access to the orbital environment,
by scientists like ourselves, is what really brings the science
around and what really puts it forward
in the scientific community.
And that's the power of having access and utilization
of the space station now that its a laboratory.
So our newest experiment we call CARA,
for Characterizing a Arabidopsis Root Attractions,
stems from this idea that how do we tell the major impact
of light on how roots grow.
And so, a very simple thing to do is we could grow plants
in these same kind of square petri plates that we grew
for our other experiments,
just out in the environment of the space station.
And so the idea will be that we'll just take a number
of these plates and they just get tacked right up to the wall
of the, the Space Station in one of the habitants
that get the ambient lighting, which will be diffuse
and coming from everywhere.
And we'll also set up a comparable set of plants
that are wrapped in black cloth, and so,
they'll start germinating on orbit,
but they'll be completely wrapped up in the dark,
and so we'll compare the plants on orbit growing
with diffuse lighting and ones that are growing
without any lighting at all, and that's the basis
of this particular experiment, it's very simple,
but very elegant, we think, in utilizing the resources
that we have at hand, that can answer some
of the fundamental questions
that our previous flight experiment brought up.
One of the things that we use
in these Arabidopsis plants is they're engineered
with a green fluorescent protein marker.
And so a number of the genes
in which we're interested are tagged, if you will,
with this green fluorescent protein, and so,
any particular place where the normal gene would be expressed,
this, this fluorescent tag gene, now will also be expressed,
and so that's something you can see, and you can see
in real time with the, the ABRS unit,
the green fluorescent protein images that we have on orbit.
But, we can't see the kind of resolution that you would really
like and so all that you can see, well, okay,
there's portions of the root that are greener,
there are portions of the leaf that are green,
but you can't tell what cells are going on in there.
We know that there are certain types of cells in the roots,
in particular, that are, play an important role
in gravity sensing and signalling, and so what we'd
like to be able to see is
which specific cells are these genes being expressed
and the only way to do that is with microscopy.
And so now with the accessibility to the LMM,
that will allow to see, in orbit,
where these genes are being expressed and how
that is changing in response to that environment.