Growing Wheat Plants with the Russians

The Russians were growing wheat plants on the Mir space station and wanted to see what kinds of microbes were in the plants' systems. They had microbial ecologists there, but they didn't have some of the technology that we did. So, some of the Russian scientists came to Kennedy Space Center (KSC) and we collaborated with them, looking at how the plants had grown while they were on Mir and how the microbiology of the system there compared with controlled samples that they had. So we just did an all-inclusive sampling, investigating what kinds of organisms were present, how many, and other similar things.

Working with the Mir project has been very exciting. We were trying to see if there were any differences or similarities in the microbiology of plants that were grown in space on Mir and the plants that were grown in the control environment in Russia. We did counts of all the microbial cells that would be there, and counts of cells that could be grown on plates. Then we identified those organisms, just to see if the kinds of organisms we saw were the same.

We found some interesting differences. The plants grown on Mir were pretty stressed, although that may have just been the way they were grown. But we're supposed to be sampling again in December, so we'll have a second batch that has been grown on the station. We'll be able to see if the results we got before are repeatable or not. With one sample, it's really hard to tell, definitively, if there's any difference.