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A Southern Illinois University Edwardsville research project has returned to Earth aboard NASA’s SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, after spending 29 days at the International Space Station. The research focuses on how plants sense gravity, and how they respond to growing in a “microgravity” environment.

The research is being conducted through a two-year, nearly $400,000 NASA grant to Ohio University and SIUE. Darron Luesse, associate professor of biological sciences within the SIUE College of Arts and Sciences, is working in collaboration with Dr. Sarah Wyatt, OU professor of molecular biology/genomics. SIUE masters student Sarah Hutchinson has also played an integral role in the research.

“I am excited and interested in what we’re going to find,” said Luesse. “The return of the research is a symbolic step in the process, but the reality is, this return marks the beginning of our next phase of the project as we work toward determining results.”

Approximately 18,000 plant seeds were sent to space. The plant being studied is Arabidopsis thaliana. Each seed is about the size of a grain of sand. A pre-weighed amount of seeds were placed in individual petri dishes. Those petri dishes were secured within a Biological Research in Canisters (BRIC) module.

“All aspects of the project went off without a problem,” explained Luesse. “The petri dishes were unpacked from the cold and grew for three days. Astronauts injected a fixative and then returned the BRIC modules to the freezer where they’ve been waiting to come back to Earth.”

While the seeds grew at the International Space Station, identical control plants were grown on Earth. Now the researchers will grind the seedlings and extract ribonucleic acid (RNA) and protein from both sets of plants.

“It looks like the RNA extractions will be done at SIUE,” said Luesse. “The Ohio University group will do the protein extractions. Then the samples will be sent to molecular biology facilities for proteomic sequencing.”

Luesse said the differences between the ground and space flight samples will provide information regarding which proteins plants make more of in space and which ones they stop producing. Data collected will identify candidates for further study and prove beneficial for both long-term space travel and agricultural output on Earth.

“Anytime we’re going to have a manned space flight in deep space, this could be to Mars or farther, it’s going to require living plants both for food and oxygen production,” Luesse explained.

We also hope to have Earth-based benefits as well. If plants can grow up instead of out, we can fit more in the same area without them crowding. So anytime we can learn how plants use gravity to influence their architecture, we could use that information to help agriculture and overall output.”

Luesse anticipates the research team will receive results from the sequencing facilities in early May. Once they review the lists of proteins and how much of them were produced, they will work to assign biological meaning.

“Once we decipher the information, we’ll hopefully develop some new hypotheses about how they are involved in plant gravity sensing,” said Luesse.

Photo: Darron Luesse, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at SIUE, displays his research ahead of the NASA launch.