10 Years and Still Growing

By Jenny Hall

If botany professor John Kiss sends plants into space as planned this summer, it will be the third time he's had a chance to find out more about growing plants away from the Earth's gravity.            

One Miamian who will be watching with intense interest is Melissa Schwind. She was in middle school in Chardon when Kiss' first experiment blasted off in 1997, but now she is engaged in research closely tied to his. Kiss has been experimenting with a seedling by the name of arabidopsis, a plant from the mustard family, for years now. This year, he is the principal investigator for a project to determine how the plants, a popular species for experimentation, perceive gravity and light.

His work is scheduled to fly on space shuttle mission STS-121. The experiment is called, Analysis of a Novel Sensory System in Roots, also known as TROPI (for tropism, the term for how plants bend toward a stimulus like gravity or light). From the results, Kiss hopes to learn more so that one day he may be a part of the intelligence behind growing food for long space missions.          

Schwind's research history is far shorter, but a poster explaining her experiment on arabidopsis' responses to gravity and light already hangs on the wall of Pearson Hall. Under Kiss' mentorship, she received a second place award for her experiment -- The Role of Phytochromes in the Gravitropic and Phototropic Responses of Inflorescence Stems of Arabidopsis Thaliana -- at the annual meeting of The American Society for Gravitational and Space Biology (ASGSB) Conference in November, 2004.           

She is a junior majoring in botany and minoring in sociology, but she already has been accepted to the Medical College of Ohio in Toledo, where she hopes to study to become a pediatrician or allergist.              

Neela Kumar, a native from India, came to the United States in December of 2000 and joined Miami University in August of 2001. She too has been mentored by Kiss and won an award for her experiment-- The Rate of Plastid Sedimentation in Hypocotyls of the arg1 Mutant of Arabidopsis-- which focused on plants' response to gravity, much like Kiss' work. Kumar said, " Dr. Kiss is a great mentor. He is very encouraging and supportive. I am honored to work with him,"            

Kiss' work is not only done by him but by others as well. Teamwork is very important in keeping the ideas and the experiment moving ahead. Some team members for Kiss' experiment were Jack Mullen, pastdoctoral researcher from Indiana University, and Marianne Steale, deputy project manager from NASA.            

Both Mullen and Steale are very involved with Kiss' experiment and have helped with the research and plans for launch. Mullen has helped with the micro gravity aspect of the project and also has looked in to the concept of the affects from red light illumination. If a plant is pretreated with red light this will cause greater differential growth in the plant shoots. The plant is then illuminated from one side with blue or white light, after being pretreated, which allows them to test if the plants growth towards the light more strongly is due to the red light attenuating gravity.         

Steale, works with responding to NASA headquarters for charts and schedules about the project and experiments. She also deals with how to get the experiment on the shuttle and stowed on the International Space Station while training the crew for the mission.         

The seedlings used in this experiment will be transferred to the International Space Station for a mission that will last approximately six months. The experiment itself will last approximately 18 days and seedling growth will be videotaped in order to see the stages in which the seedlings will grow in space. At the end of the experiments, seedling samples will be frozen and returned to Earth.          

The findings from this experiment will bring forth new ideas concerning plants relation to light without gravity as well as possibly finding out possible food sources for long term space missions. It is believed that after its six months in space the seedlings will need to be analyzed for another year and a half to be sure all the information is collected.          

It's been almost 10 years since Kiss started this experiment; he has flown it to space before and will surely do so again. One can only imagine how long this will go on but who knows, maybe there is another Melissa Schwind sitting in middle school now waiting for the chance to study arabidopsis and change the scientific and space world forever.

Read more of Jenny Hall's articles:

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