Space Plants Lab at UF | Three days before launch



Anna-Lisa Paul's hands are steady.



The pressure to plant 20 to 30 seeds in a tiny petri dish using a water dropper in under 10 minutes doesn’t faze her. Granted, the University of Florida plant molecular biologist has been doing this for "20 odd years."

If the seeds are not placed onto the dish, then sealed, labeled and put back into cold storage before the timer goes off, they may be useless to the experiment. Low temperatures and the dark keep the seeds dormant.

They have to wait to live their first life in space.

The seeds she's planting are part of a long-term collaborative experiment by UF’s Space Plants Lab and NASA to test how organisms respond to zero gravity and a spaceflight environment. In this experiment, the team is looking deep into the ways plants respond to life in space by observing how plants' genetic materials help them adapt to space — an environment completely outside of their evolutionary experience.

Although people can go and grab a sweater when they're cold, plants cannot move, so they need to knit one on the spot when faced with unexpected temperatures. They "knit" with their genes. The Space Plants team wants to know more about how gene expression helps plants adapt to new environments and, in particular, outer space.

To knit their novel space sweaters, plants will need to find new patterns for an environment which they have never been exposed to by turning off certain genes and utilizing others in ways plants never have before.

"Our research allows NASA to understand how plants will enable deep space exploration," Paul says. "To live or travel in space for long spans of time, we’ll need to understand how plants live and adapt to being in space, but we also have to understand how to enable plants to grow in these very strange environments."

The first space plants experiment conducted by Paul and co-team leader Robert Ferl, also a plant molecular biologist with UF's Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, was a five-day flight on Space Shuttle Columbia in 1999. This time, as part of a Space Station cargo delivery mission, the plants will soar into space on SpaceX’s Falcon aircraft from Kennedy Space Center.



But for now, the team needs to ensure that no major stress is inflicted upon the plants until they reach orbit. To understand how plants adapt to space life, any stress that induces change within the plants must happen in space, with no interference from earthly stresses.

It’s a lot of work that could potentially be scrubbed, along with the launch. If it's delayed more than a day, the team will rush back to UF and prepare more seeds.

But if Paul is stressed, she doesn’t show it. She’s focused.

In fact, when her mind does wander, it doesn’t wander far. There are doodles in the margins of a notebook that sits next to her. Various types of leaves decorate the pages: serrate, sinuate, scalloped. "The more doodles, the longer the conference call," she says.

There’s a couple of penciled flowers, too. The space-bound seeds are Arabidopsis Thaliana — flowering weeds.



But, first, they have to get the dormant and undisturbed seeds to KSC and then to space, which is no simple task.