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SALT LAKE CITY — University of Utah chemistry professor Ming Hammond is a leading researcher on an experiment that launched plants into space in December in an attempt to assess how plants may fit into survival in the cosmos. Wednesday, they were analyzing the results from their completed experiment.
Hammond’s primary goal for their efforts was to analyze in real-time whether plants engineered to bio-manufacture specific proteins can also do so in space. Hydra-1, the experiment, involved synthetic biology and the alteration of genetic code to redesign and engineer DNA. Hammond and her colleagues utilized a subset of this research to see whether they could utilize synthetic biology to create protein designs in space.
“First thing, quick caveat, is to say we’re definitely still working through all of our data,” Hammond told KSL.com. “We were actually quite surprised to see that the plant tube experiment that was on the space station showed really dramatically different results than the ground control that we ran here in the lab.”
The genetically engineered plants were stored in “plant cubes,” created by Ice Cubes, which are engineered vessels that provide a receptacle for scientists to conduct experiments in from space.
The plants were sent into space on Dec. 5 at NASA Kennedy Space Center, safely stored in a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket already on a resupply mission to the International Space Station. Other collaborators on Hydra-1 spanned two continents, including the NASA Ames Research Center, the University of Strasbourg and the International Space University.
During the experiment, the researchers had been observing the plants with the help of specialized cameras in the cubes. “To our surprise germination happened early,” Hammond said. “We were expecting four or five days, and we started seeing germination after three or four days.”
Two weeks after the experiment began, it ended and the plants were brought back to Earth for further study. The next step was to actually test the plants and establish whether they had produced the desired proteins. The researchers have not yet released results from whether or not the plants successfully produced proteins, but they have made some very interesting findings thus far.
“(The ground control experiment) was literally out of the page of the textbook. It looked perfect,” Hammond said. “The space experiment, however... (The plants) were not as hearty or healthy-looking as the experiments on the ground. There definitely were some differences in how the plants grew.”
Certain extra challenges experienced by the space plants could have caused the less-effective growth. The space plants were “blasted off in a rocket, vibrated, there was a lot of handling, and so on,” Hammond explained. “All of those challenges, including temperature fluctuations before the experiment started, didn’t happen to our ground control.”
Hammond wants to get to the bottom of this difference, which requires that they start asking what all the variables are.
“We would love to be able to say ‘oh, it’s due to differences in space flight versus on the ground,’” she said. “But before we can say that definitively, we want to go through and see that there isn’t any variable we haven’t nailed down.”
Despite the less effective growth among the space plants, the researchers are still optimistic that they will see the transgenic plants as having grown proteins. Even if the growth of the plants wasn’t a complete success, Hammond believes there’s a lot to be gained from their research.
“We are only one of many groups around the world that is interested in this concept of space biomanufacturing, so I think that it’s really exciting to see this community of people working not just with plants but also with other synthetic biology organisms,” she said. “I know that the plant cube is meant to be an open platform, so I really hope that not just the results of our experiment, but also our experience with the engineered unit, will encourage other researchers to think of this as the initial platform for them to develop their own experiments.”
There’s a lot of interest in these plants, not just on space stations, but also on planetary missions and lunar missions.
“There’s a path forward for this, especially for our collaborators at NASA and the International Space Station,” she said.
Hammond would like to experiment with chemistry in space next. “The space station really is a resource for scientific research that is not just focused on what we’re doing, but also on science experiments where the technology is actually meant to help those of us here on Earth right now.”
There are many experiments going on that believe some problems might be solved by removing gravity as a factor.
“The mission of the space station is worthwhile for the exploration of space,” Hammond said, “but also for the science and technology to benefit us in the form of new products or medicine to benefit those at home.”
