Abstract
Terrestrial plants from the very limits of life are likely to harbor genes that confer an advantage in human space exploration. These plants are seemingly capable of performing mission critical functions in spaceflight and on extraterrestrial farms while informing directed gene manipulation in target plant species. However, their adaptations to physiologically extreme habitats may hinder the efficacy of routine laboratory techniques for model plants. We here present the development of Antarctic moss Ceratodon purpureus payload and flight operations for the ANT1 Radiation Tolerance Experiment with Moss in Orbit on the Space Station (ARTEMOSS) experiment to the International Space Station (ISS) given limited physical space and crew time. We demonstrate that the hydrophobic surface of Antarctic moss impedes chemical tissue fixation and precludes the use of RNAlater coupled with payload hardware deployed in standard plant spaceflight experiments. We show that deep-freezing the moss tissue on Petri plates provides adequate tissue fixation and allows the extraction of high-quality RNA suitable for gene expression profiling. We replaced hardware with stacks of Petri plates housing Antarctic moss and chemical fixation with deep-freezing in a cryogenic GLACIER freezer. Our design can be translated to other plant species to expand current experimentation techniques with plants from extreme terrestrial environments in order to advance human space exploration.
Abstract from the paper’s OpenAlex record; open copy licensed cc-by. Read at the source ↗
The text the model read, with the source record’s inline markup (italics, sub- and superscripts) rendered and its character entities decoded; quote offsets refer to the raw text.
Claims 4
Claim · model-written summary
Hydrophobic Antarctic moss surfaces impeded chemical tissue fixation.
- Taxon
- Ceratodon purpureus
Ceratodon purpureust0 - Outcome
- impedes chemical tissue fixatione0
- Comparator
- chemical tissue fixatione0
Organisms pictured · Representative pictures of the matched species, not figures from the paper.
Verbatim
e0“the hydrophobic surface of Antarctic moss impedes chemical tissue fixation”
t0“Antarctic moss Ceratodon purpureus payload”
Claim · model-written summary
The hydrophobic moss surface precluded use of RNAlater with standard payload hardware.
- Taxon
- Ceratodon purpureusCeratodon purpureust0
- Outcome
- precludes the use of RNAlatere0
- Comparator
- payload hardware deployed in standard plant spaceflight experimentse0
Organisms pictured · Representative pictures of the matched species, not figures from the paper.
Verbatim
e0“precludes the use of RNAlater coupled with payload hardware deployed in standard plant spaceflight experiments”
t0“Antarctic moss Ceratodon purpureus payload”
Claim · model-written summary
Deep-freezing moss tissue on Petri plates provided adequate tissue fixation.
- Taxon
- Ceratodon purpureusCeratodon purpureust0
- Treatment
- deep-freezing the moss tissue on Petri platese0
- Outcome
- adequate tissue fixatione0
- Comparator
- Petri platese0
Organisms pictured · Representative pictures of the matched species, not figures from the paper.
Verbatim
e0“deep-freezing the moss tissue on Petri plates provides adequate tissue fixation and allows the extraction of high-quality RNA suitable for gene expression profiling”
t0“Antarctic moss Ceratodon purpureus payload”
Claim · model-written summary
Deep-freezing moss tissue on Petri plates enabled extraction of high-quality RNA for expression profiling.
- Taxon
- Ceratodon purpureusCeratodon purpureust0
- Treatment
- deep-freezing the moss tissue on Petri platese0
- Outcome
- high-quality RNA suitable for gene expression profilinge0
- Comparator
- Petri platese0
Organisms pictured · Representative pictures of the matched species, not figures from the paper.
Verbatim
e0“deep-freezing the moss tissue on Petri plates provides adequate tissue fixation and allows the extraction of high-quality RNA suitable for gene expression profiling”
t0“Antarctic moss Ceratodon purpureus payload”