Biologist’s plants will go to space station
Chris Wolverton is ready for his Super Bowl.
There won’t be touchdowns. There won’t be a trophy.
But there will be fireworks, of sorts. And cheerleaders, too.
Because when you’re a scientist launching your research into space, you bring the whole family.
“For all of the athletes who bring 50 or 60 family members and friends when they make it to the Super Bowl, this is that
level,” Wolverton recalls his brother saying when making plans to see the Ohio Wesleyan University botany and microbiology professor’s plant research launch on a SpaceX rocket headed for the International Space Station this month.
“I’d never thought of it that way,” Wolverton said. “I just think of it as, ‘Oh, this is a good way to test my question.’”
The question he and his team hope to answer: How do plants detect and respond to differing levels of gravity?
It’s not as though scientists need to know how much gravity to give plants on Earth, because it’s a constant force here, Wolverton said. But plants are constantly responding to gravity, and there’s relatively little understanding about how gravity triggers a plant to grow in a certain direction or to set a branch in one spot or another, he said.
“We need to know it because knowing how plants sense gravity and respond to gravity has implications for all of plant growth,” he said, pointing to applications in engineering drought-tolerant crops, nutrient-efficient crops or crops that can grow more closely together, for example.
The research also has space implications, said Elizabeth Pane, project manager at NASA Ames Research Center, who has worked with Wolverton on the plant-gravity research project.
"We need to know how plants grow without gravity, so that we can grow them on Mars or on a future space station so that humans can live out there for a longer period of time than they are doing now," Pane said.
For the experiment, Wolverton and his team are sending seedlings of Arabidopsis thaliana — a plant in the mustard family — to the space station. They’ll send some wild seeds and some mutant seeds, which have a broken gene and are less responsive to Earth’s gravity. Fourteen seedlings are placed on each of 120 small cassette-like membranes. Those cassettes will be placed in hardware aboard the space station, where the crew will apply varying levels of gravity, from zero-gravity to an Earthlike 1 G.
Wolverton wrote a NASA grant proposal for the experiment in 2014, building off a previous plant-gravity research he conducted in his lab. He was notified in 2015 that it had been selected, and since then, Wolverton, along with NASA scientists, has worked on a series of verification tests to ensure the experiment is feasible. That involved trips to Norway and the Ames Research Center in California to test the flight hardware.
The grant also allowed Wolverton to hire a technician to assist with the project. Suddenly, 2016 Ohio Wesleyan graduate Nathan Madonich found himself in a job with ties to some of science’s pinnacles — NASA and the International Space Station — as he applies to graduate school.
“It’s been one of my biggest growing experiences,” Madonich said. “The institutions themselves are kind of scary, but all the people I’ve interacted with have been extremely supportive.”
The rocket with Wolverton’s research will launch from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The launch is scheduled for Friday, though it’s been delayed once and could be again. Wolverton and Madonich plan to travel to the space center for the launch, along with Wolverton’s wife, Jennifer, his daughter, Lindsay, 14, and his son, Jack, 10. Wolverton’s mother, mother-in-law and his brother and his family also hope to attend, he said.
Wolverton and Madonich will receive and begin analyzing near-real-time images of the plants as they’re in space. The plants also will be frozen and brought back for further study of their gene expressions in the spring, in collaboration with researchers at Ohio University.
Wolverton’s experiment has evolved from his “little project” to a full-fledged team effort with NASA and its scientists, for which he is grateful.
“It feels like mine, but also like it’s very shared, in a very good way," he said.
The project has also brought some validation to Wolverton’s plant science — work that he says isn’t a “fancy science” and might not directly cure a disease, but is still important.
“I still have a chip on my shoulder about being a plant biologist and kind of wanting to prove this is a worthy science,” he said. “Getting (the project) to the point of being selected and getting on (the space) station, that’s a signal that NASA thinks so too.”