OXFORD, Ohio John Z. Kiss, professor of botany, is the principal investigator on a new project to study plant development on the International Space Station (ISS). Richard E. Edelmann, supervisor of Miami's electron microscope facility, and Roger P. Hangarter of Indiana University are co-investigators.
The three year NASA grant is estimated at $460,000. The project was selected by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration through an international peer review process completed earlier this year. The actual space flight is a few years away as the ISS and the laboratory facilities to be housed in the station are still under construction. Until then, Kiss and his team will conduct ground-based experiments and begin space flight hardware development.
Kiss and Edelmann successfully conducted plant experiments aboard the Space Shuttle during two flights in 1997. The goal of the current research is to better understand how plants integrate sensory input from multiple light and gravity perception systems. The long-range goals are related to developing better crop plants on earth and to determining plants' potential use as a food source during prolonged human time in space. They will again use Arabidopsis, a small plant in the mustard family, that is currently the focus of an international gene sequencing project analogous to the human genome project.
In September Kiss traveled to NASA Ames Research Center in California and
presented a seminar on his research to scientists, engineers, and program
managers. NASA personnel also visited Kiss' laboratory in Pearson Hall.
Most of the preliminary data that was used in the successful grant proposal to
NASA was related to work done by senior Nicholas Ruppel. Ruppel, of Wadsworth,
Ohio, has been doing independent research in Kiss' laboratory and has
participated in both the Summer Scholar Program and the Hughes Internship
Program at Miami. "Students' involvement in independent research can be the most important
educational experience in their undergraduate careers," says Kiss.