Dr. Darron Luesse, SIUE professor from the Department of Biological Sciences.
How do plants react to a lack of gravity and why? Professors from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and Ohio University want to find out. Thanks to a roughly $383,000 NASA grant to Ohio University, important work in this area of research will take place.
SIUE Professor of Biological Sciences Dr. Darron Luesse and Ohio University Professor of Molecular Biology/Genomics Dr. Sarah Wyatt will focus on how plant life senses gravity and reacts to it. The research, according to Luesse, will aid in the understanding of basic biology.
SIUE’s portion of the grant is $120,926, which will be utilized during a two-year period. The first year of research of the grant will consist of setting up the experiment and refining methods. By the end of the first year, Luesse said the hope is to send their experiment to the International Space Station.
According to the SIUE Graduate School, a graduate assistant will be hired to work closely with Luesse on research, helping to gather data and analyze results.
“This is a unique opportunity for SIUE to participate in a NASA-funded study of the effects of gravity on plant growth, development and physiological processes—raising SIUE’s profile as an institution that can study plant protein expression in the most extreme environments, including space flight,” said Jerry Weinberg, dean of the Graduate School.
Arabidopsis thaliana, the specific plant being studied, is “the number one model organism for plants,” Luesse said, adding, “Arabidopsis is to plants what the fruit fly is to animals.”
While he noted the plant has no agricultural value, its relative small size and completely sequenced genome have allowed the development of many beneficial molecular biology tools for the Arabidopsis research community.
Luesse said while experiments like this have been conducted on Earth for many years, conducting the experiment in space will allow for a “no-gravity control” environment.”
Luesse and Wyatt will place nearly 1,300 Arabidopsis seeds into a small set of petri dishes that will be stacked and secured within a Biological Research in Canisters (BRIC) module, designed to fit aboard the International Space Station. Each seed is about the size of a grain of sand. The plan is to transport the seeds into outer space, where they will germinate and grow inside the petri dishes.
“When they arrive at the Space Station, the crew will add some fixative after they’ve grown for about five days; essentially freezing them in time,” Luesse said. “Then the plants will be placed in a freezer and remain there until they are brought back to Earth.”
Upon their return to Earth, the protein will be extracted from the plants and sent for sequencing. Identical control plants will be grown on Earth in tandem with the space flight experiment. These methods will allow detection and quantification of all proteins produced in these different conditions, Luesse said.
“By determining differences between the ground and space flight samples, we gain information about which proteins plants make more of in space, and which ones they stop producing,” he said. “He added these advanced proteomic and genomic techniques allow the study of global changes in growth and development at the molecular level.
Luesse said the researchers will use bioinformatics, the process of using computers to analyze biological data, to make gene networks.
“Using computers to analyze these data sets allows the comparison of thousands of proteins between the two samples,” he noted. “In addition, the bioinformatics programs can integrate existing gene expression data to help increase the relevance of the results.
“In the end, we have an ordered list of proteins that are turned on or off during space flight, and in many cases, a rough idea of their biological function.”
This list of proteins will be used to identify candidates for further study, Luesse added. Future experiments will attempt to determine the specific function of these proteins, figure out why they are turned on or off during space flight, and seek to make use of this information in a relevant way.
This might include recommendations for alternatives to existing agricultural practices, identifying specific proteins that can be targets for genetic engineering or the development of further questions that could be answered by future space-flight experiments.
The research could have a significant impact on the approach to long-term space travel, Luesse said. People currently live on the International Space Station, he added, but the researchers’ work is important, because it looks into the future. In order for individuals to live on other planets, or travel through space for any extended period of time, it will be critical to determine appropriate plant life that can be taken with them to supply oxygen and food.