In August 2024, UF’s Rob Ferl became the first NASA-supported researcher to launch into suborbital space with his own experiment. The study builds on prior research showing that the plant Arabidopsis thaliana can detect when it is in space and then change how its genes are expressed. Ferl will carry the plants in tubes attached to the legs of his flight suit.
Ferl will chemically lock the plant’s genes with a preservative to pause the plants at various points in the launch – just before takeoff, at the start of zero gravity, at the end of zero gravity, and at landing. Researchers will then sequence the plants’ expressed genes and compare them to an on-Earth control experiment to figure out which were activated or deactivated during the flight.
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