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Virgin Galactic just launched plants into space
21.08.2023 - 11:57 / theunconventionalgardener.com / Emma Doughty
When Virgin Galactic’s Unity 22 flew into space on Sunday, it carried one billionaire passenger and three tubes filled with plants.
For Virgin Galactic, this was an opportunity to demonstrate to the world’s scientists that they could now conduct their own experiments in microgravity. For researchers from the University of Florida Space Plants Lab, it was a chance to continue their work into understanding how plants adapt to spaceflight.
Since the early 1990s, Dr Robert Ferl and Dr Anna-Lisa Paul have been working with “reporter genes” that allow us to see when plants are experiencing environmental stress. They added a gene from a fluorescent jellyfish into Arabidopsis thaliana, the model plant used in many plant science experiments. Using specialised cameras that can see the plants glow reveals their response to different stresses – including space travel.
Over the years, Ferl and Paul have launched plant experiments on the space shuttle and the International Space Station. They’ve even experienced microgravity alongside their plants during parabolic flights (AKA the Vomit Comet). You can read more about their work in this blog post they wrote in 2017: Taking plants off-planet – how do they grow in zero gravity?
Their results show that plants in microgravity “know” their environment has changed and respond dramatically. Plant changes which of their genes are switched on or off, and how their roots grow. And while that’s of interest to botanists, it may also have important implications for human space flight.
“About half of the genes in our bodies encode the exact same proteins in plants. That’s very exciting, because it means that as we look at how plants behave in the absence of gravity, we can translate many of those basic
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