A Rose By Any Other Name

According to International Flavors & Fragrances, the commercial partner, the results were literally out of this world. ìThe fact that fragrance molecules do change in proportion to one another promises to lend a greater dimension to future fragrance research and the possibility of using microgravity to create new fragrance entities, or, for that matter, any chemical products including possibly pharmaceuticals, that the plant produces,î states Eugene Grisanti, Chairman and CEO of International Flavors & Fragrances. Dr. Braja Mookherjee, Vice President and Director of Natural Products Research states ìThis transformation has created a completely new fragrance that is not of this Earth. IFF intends to further explore space research on living plant materials to benefit mankind.î

Seed production is an essential part of crop production: without a good supply of seeds, farmers can not plant their fields. In 1996, the Wisconsin Center for Space Automation and Robotics (WCSAR), a Commercial Space Center, and Pioneer Hi-Bred International launched a research effort to accelerate plant growth so that new seeds could be produced in the shortest possible amount of time. This research was done using the Commercial Plant Biotechnology Facility, designed for space-based research and featuring a totally enclosed and precisely controlled environment, and was able to reduce plant growth cycles. An example of this was reducing the soybean growth cycle from an average of 110 days to an average of 62 days a significant improvement. This was made possible through the advanced software and related technologies, and the use of ASTROCULTUREô technologies that have been proven on the Shuttle.

An out-of-this-world technology has landed at local grocers and elsewhere to help keep fruits and vegetables fresh and ready to eat. The system, developed for use in the ASTROCULTUREô commercial plant growth facility, removes ethylene from the air. Ethylene is a natural hormone that is an essential part of the ripening process. Too much of it, however, causes plants and plant products to prematurely wither and spoil. KES Science and Technology of Georgia has licensed the patent to the system, which uses glass pellets coated with titanium dioxide and ultraviolet light to remove ethylene, and is marketing it under the brand name Bio-Kleen to grocers and others involved with the storage and transports of plants and materials. Unlike other systems, this technology requires virtually no maintenance and has also been shown to reduce bacteria, molds, and odors from storage rooms. It is estimated that the system could increase the shelf-life of perishable items by a week, providing a significant savings by reducing the amount of food or other materials that spoil and have to be thrown away.

The production minitubers, dime-sized potatoes used as seeds for larger crops, is a business that is anything but small potatoes. Unlike other seed crops, seed potatoes are bulky and heavy, and most countries limit their import as a means of controlling plant disease. In addition, the normal process of producing new, disease free seed potatoes can literally take years to bear fruit. Yet many countries need improved seed potatoes now, since as much as 85 percent of current crops are diseased to the point that they are not fit for human consumption. American Ag-Tec International, Ltd. is making use of the environmental and growth systems developed for use in the ASTROCULTUREô and the Commercial Plant Biotechnology Facility to address this critical problem.

The Quantumô Tuber Facility is expected to make significant contributions to addressing this need. According to American Ag-Tec International President Robert Britt, one Quantumô Tuber Facility with approximately 1,000 growth chambers, could replace one quarter of the seed potatoes imported by Egypt, allowing the $30 million spent on them to be used for other purposes. In addition, the system is also considered to be ìidealî for growing plants that contain ìedible vaccines.î Such genetically altered potatoes are already being grown, and the use of plants for such work reduces the chance of contamination, is less expensive than building new facilities for traditional means of production, and eliminates the need to give shots to administer the vaccine. By growing such plants in a country, the costs of shipping and problems with refrigerating the cargo to prevent spoilage are eliminated. As a result, the Quantumô Tuber Facility may prove to be an important tool for crop improvement, fighting hunger, and fighting disease.

Any gambler will tell you that odds of 1 in a 1,000, or worse, are not a good bet. Yet, those are the odds facing researchers trying to transfer desirable genes into food and other important crops. A commercial agribusiness experiment on STSñ95, however, indicates that microgravity may dramatically change the odds in favor of the researchers and make the operation far less a gamble.

Instead of older methodsósuch as cross pollination and graftingóthat can take years to produce results, researchers now use bacteria to transfer the gene carrying the desired trait to seedlings. These seedlings will, in turn, pass the trait along to future generations of the plant. In Earth-based laboratories, however, the expected success rate for this process is at best 1 plant in 1,000, or 0.1 percent. In the experimentóperformed by industry partners Rapigen LLC, The Indiana Crop Improvement Association, Inc., Christophersen & Associates, Inc., and the University of Toledoó approximately 1,000 soybean seedlings had their growing point (meristem) region damaged just before launch, and were wrapped in water-soaked paper rolls that were then placed in a modified ASTROCULTUREô locker. Damaging the growing point provided a point of entry for bacteria containing the gene to be transferred, in this case a marker gene that is fluorescent and easily tracked. The bacteria was mixed into growth media and transferred into the containers with the paper rolls once on orbit. ìThe level of genetic transfer was way beyond our expectations,î says Ray Bula, a Principal with Rapigen LLC and a retired director of WCSAR. ìWe thought that if we could double the rate of transfer seen on Earth, it would have been promising.î Instead of simply doubling, according to Bula, there was more than a 10-fold increase in genetic transfer compared with the ground-based control experiment. While this was extremely successful, an unanticipated result was a high rate of infection.

For a number of reasons, the growth of bacteria is much more difficult to control in microgravity than it is on Earth. As a result, the high rate of infection blocked the vascular system of the plants. Bula states that this problem can be corrected, in part, by reducing the amount of bacteria since less is needed to do the job in microgravity.