Projected Science Payload
Our payload will be broken into two compartments, one cooled to 4 degrees Celsius and one at ambient temperature. Both compartments will be heat-insulated to keep the temperature constant during flight. In each compartment, there will be four to six plates each of agravitropic and wild type Arabidopsis thaliana plants.
Payload Dimensions:
Our payload will consist of 16 to 24 2.6 inch stacked Petri dishes, an estimated two feet in height and weight of around 0.5 lbs.
Figure 1: Payload schematic (A:agravitropic mutants; W: wild type plants).Project Synopsis
The results from last year’s experiment showed an interesting and compelling resiliency of A. thaliana agravitropic mutants to brief and violent acceleratory forces. Our wild-type plants, on the other hand, showed all signs of an extreme stress response to these forces, such as stunted growth or plant death. This data caught the attention of our University of Wisconsin scientific community prompting and necessitating further exploration to determine the mechanisms stimulated by the flight stresses. As is the nature of scientific inquiry, the results of last year’s experiment brought to light new questions, the most intriguing of which is the resiliency of agravitropic mutants to flight stresses. It is our hope, therefore, to gain more insight into the mechanisms by which agravitropic mutants protect themselves from the stresses of rocket flight. In order to do this, we will compare the expression of several stress-response genes in these two seed-lines through Reverse-Transcriptase Polymerase Chain Reactions (RT-PCR).
Figure 2: Results from last year's experiment. CC, BV and SC represent Control, Booster and Sustainer Wild-type plants; CA, BA, and SA represent Control, Booster and Sustainer Agravitropic plants. Note the difference between SA (agravitropic plants from sustainer) and SC (wild type plants from sustainer) groups. While the agravitropic plants seem unaffected, the wild type of plants are either dead or severely stunted.
The protection provided by the agravitropic trait is desirable because it allows
successful transport of plants in rockets (or other vehicles) undergoing
substantial acceleratory forces. However, agravitropism is an undesirable trait in
that the plants do not grow normally- they are unaffected by gravity, so they
grow in abnormal directions. Therefore, we wish to mimick this protection in
wild-type seedlings. Research shows that lowering the temperature of plants
decreases the metabolic rate, preventing further growth and possibly protecting
the plants from outside stresses. We hypothesize that if we apply cold treatment
to wild-type plants shortly prior to and during rocket flight, we can replicate the
protection provided by the agravitropism trait. The aforementioned RT-PCR
method will be effective in comparing the expression of certain stress-response
genes in the dormant seedlings to that of agravitropic seedlings. In short, our
research question is:
How will the post-flight expression of stress-related genes in mutant
agravitropic plants compare to that of wild-type plants whose metabolic
rate has been decreased through cold treatment?