Abstract
A two-storey space plant laboratory at the University of Guelph (Canada), costing ∼$8 million when completely equipped, will be the world’s largest space garden facility for the study of plant growth under minimal atmospheric pressure. The facility will contain nine hypobaric chambers, each the size of a large refrigerator. The undertaking would mimic the situation on Mars, and is essential if humans should ever need to spend time on Mars.In another space venture, NASA’s 24 April 2000 space-shuttle mission, STS 101, carried a payload with 1000 germinating soybean seeds that were to be transformed using Agrobacterium. The Wisconsin Center for Space Automation and Robotics, in partnership with the biotechnology company Producers’ Natural Processing (IN, USA) prepared the research project. It appears that microgravity increases the normal rate (1 per 1000) of transformation, which would increase the chance of identifying superior clones.
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