(July 16, 2015) Space
may not be the final frontier for Anna-Lisa Paul and Robert Ferl; they want to
grow plants there. Because, who knows, we may one day try to live on Mars, and
to survive, we’ll have to grow our own food.
Thus far, experiments by the two pioneering scientists have
proven so successful that, earlier this month, NASA recognized their research
with one of its three awards in the category of the Most Compelling Results.
Paul and Ferl have been conducting plants-in-space research for 20 years.
“It was indeed nice to receive the recognition from NASA,”
said Paul, a research professor in the UF/IFAS Department of Horticultural
Sciences. “The award recognizes our research approaches of using transgenic
plants to serve as biological sensors of the space flight environment. This
research is another step in moving our science forward in our exploration of
how plants respond to this novel environment.”
Paul explained how all this research helps us on planet
Earth.
“First, the more we can understand how plants respond to
novel and extreme environments, the more prepared we are for understanding how
plants will respond to the changing environments we are experiencing on Earth,”
she said.
“Second, it gives the scientific community new insight into
how plants sense and respond to external stimuli at a fundamental, molecular
level. And last, what we learn helps inform our collective efforts to take our
biology off the planet. When we leave Earth’s orbit, we will take plants with
us.” added Ferl, who is the director of the UF Interdisciplinary Center for
Biotechnology Research.
NASA recognized Paul and Ferl for their work on three recent
experiments.
During the experiments, NASA scientists sent plants to the
International Space Station to test Paul and Ferl’s ideas about how plants
sense changes in their environment, and then how they respond to those changes.
“One of the first things we found was that certain types of
root-growth strategies that plants use on Earth that were always thought to
require gravity for guidance actually do not require gravity at all, as we saw
plants use those same strategies on the space station,” Paul said.
That result led to new hypotheses: In the absence of
gravity, light plays a bigger role in guiding plant roots, and that researchers
could get a clue as to what underlies those strategies by looking at the genes
of the plants grown without gravity.