Published on January 21, 2018
The International Space Station is a garden for seedlings that scientists are studying as part of the effort to go to Mars: NASA Commentator Bill Hubscher at the Marshall Space Flight Center talks with Dr. Imara Perera of North Carolina State University, the principal investigator of the Plant RNA Regulation experiment, which is looking into gene expression in plants grown in space. Those genetic changes affect how the plants grow and develop in weightlessness, and the scientists studying them expect to find new molecules that influence how the plants adapt to the environment, information that will be vital to plans for growing plants as sources of both food and oxygen on future missions out into the solar system.
