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DEVELOPMENT OF A PLANT GENETIC ASSESSMENT AND CONTROL DEVICE FOR SPACE ENVIRONMENTS.  K.A. Findlay, TJ White, W.E. Winner and T.L. Lomax.  Department of Botany and Plant Pathology, Oregon State University, Corvallis.

   Implementing NASA’s stated goal of expanding human presence in space will depend upon designing a renewable life support system.  A plant-based system will provide future astronauts with necessities such as carbon dioxide removal, oxygen generation, water vapor modulation, sustenance, pharmaceuticals, and other vitamins or nutrients necessary for long-duration space flight.  A system designed to monitor plant health, such that problems can be detected before they become critical, is essential to plant-based life support.  We have proposed a system to assess plant gene expression as a measurement of overall plant physiology.  This automated system consists of a device that collects and loads plant samples into a wet chemistry laboratory then processes the samples into purified RNA that is analyzed by microarray.  Microarray data is analyzed to generate whole plant physiological status.
 The necessary individual components may exist now to build the complete system.  Robots have the ability to visualize plants in an enclosed chamber and harvest products or collect tissue samples. An enclosed microfluidic lab, perhaps on a multi-chamber spinning disk or an electronically-gated chip can process tissue samples into labeled probe that is analyzed by a microarray chip.  Converting raw microarray data into information that can be used by the astronauts, however, will require the development of a “virtual plant” that can accurately predict the physiological consequence of any environ-mental input or differential gene expression.  A bioinformatics database such as that does not now exist, but will be the eventual outcome of expanded knowledge of the interconnectedness between metabolic, regulatory, enzymatic and other pathways of various plant species.

(Supported by NIAC: NAS5-98051)