Volume 4, Number 3    July/August 1996

Moving Forward

Station Identification

Commercial Plant Biotechnology on the International Space Station

The goal of plant biotechnology is to enhance the availability of plant products that improve our quality of life and also contribute to the preservation of our environment. In the foreseeable future, plant products will affect, in one way or another, essentially all facets of our daily lives. In spite of extraordinary success in recent years, new techniques are needed to expand the horizons of plant biotechnology. This includes using new techniques in space to modify specific plant processes that could lead to superior materials and a wide range of commercially important products.

The unique attribute of space, reduced gravity, can provide a new tool for enhancing plant biotechnology activities. The International Space Station will be an ideal facility for conducting this research because it can house a sizable plant chamber and allow enough time for plants to grow from seed to maturity.

One of the most active areas of plant biotechnology involves transferring desirable genes into plant material that has no commercial value and transforming that material into a commercially important crop variety. One recent example is this year's corn hybrids that have a gene that resists the corn borer insect, which is responsible for severe losses to sweet and field corn producers. The new gene allows the corn plant to produce a material that is toxic to the insect's larvae, thus eliminating the need to use chemicals to control the insect and consequently minimizing potential hazards on our environment. This ability to transfer genes in a reduced gravity environment has generated interest among companies involved in the genetic engineering of new plant materials.

Another area of commercial interest is how reduced gravity affects the biosynthesis of secondary plant constituents, or chemicals produced by plants that may have therapeutic value. These materials are becoming increasingly important as pharmaceuticals. Previous space experiments revealed that plant processes, such as starch accumulation, cell wall formation and lignin synthesis, may increase when plants are grown in the reduced gravity of space. Companies using data from space experiments can better understand how environmental factors influence the synthesis of plant constituents, leading to new products.

The Wisconsin Center for Space Automation and Robotics, a NASA Commercial Space Center located at the College of Engineering of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and several of its industry partners have developed a totally enclosed, controlled-environment plant growth chamber. This unit, identified as the Astrocultureª flight unit, has been used to grow plants on the SPACEHAB-03 and the Second United States Microgravity Laboratory (USML-2) missions. Plants grown during these space missions appeared normal and vigorous.

The Astroculture flight hardware is currently configured for a single Space Shuttle middeck locker. Activity is under way to increase this unit to accommodate more plants growing from seed to maturity, up to 24 inches tall. The new unit for the Space Station will be called the Commercial Plant Biotechnology Facility. It will be installed in one-half of an Express rack. It is projected to be included in the UF-02 mission scheduled for July 1999. Once on the Space Station, the facility will become a unique tool for conducting a number of commercial plant experiments, leading to high-value plant materials.

The Commercial Space Center program is sponsored by the Office of Space Access and Technology.

For more information, contact Raymond Bula at the Wisconsin Center for Space Automation and Robotics.Phone: 608/262-5526.
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