Joining Reddy at NASA's Kennedy Space Center were Mykles and Farida Safadi-Chamberlain, a postdoctoral research associate. Mykles shares with Reddy an interest in the role of calcium in cell function.
"With this experiment we'll be cataloging every gene that responds to gravity," said Mykles. "We currently have just a few pieces of this immense jigsaw puzzle, but with this project we hope to get most of them."
According to Reddy, "Our main goal is to find out how plants can sense the gravity signal, to determine what genes are turned on or off by gravity. If we find that a certain gene is regulated by gravity, we expect to find its function in gravitropism."
Arabidopsis won't be the first plant grown in space; Russian cosmonauts, for example, grew wheat aboard MIR. And Reddy expects roots to sprout without specific direction. What excites him is the opportunity to observe at the genetic level why this takes place.
He suspects two likely discoveries: the project will eventually reveal what proteins are involved in sensing gravity signals, and the investigators may discover how calcium ions mediate gravity-signal sensing. In fact, while the experiment is rooted in up-and-down, Reddy says the effort actually involves three major projects:
About 20 hours before launch, Reddy and Safadi-Chamberlain spread the
seeds, 10,000 to a dish, on 24 Petri dishes containing a growth medium. They're
carried in a container on the shuttle's middeck (the cargo bay wil
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Contact: David Weymiller
dweymiller@vines.colostate.edu
970-491-6851
Colorado State University
23-Jul-1999