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Reducing Plant Stress Leads to Martian Farms
Saint Aardvark the Carpeted writes "NASA is looking for ways to get plants to grow on Mars -- and surprisingly, reducing their stress is a good first step. By splicing genes from Earth-bound extremophiles into seeds whose descendants are destined for the red planet, scientists hope to breed plants that can handle the wide range of temperatures (pdf) that will be found on Mars."
for some martain chronic, JEAH BOI!
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time is your 6th sense, the wierd ones are 7+
Is it just me or did that summary look like complete gibberish?
the red weed???
I got nothin'
I heard that singing to plants helps thenm grow and reduce their stress levels. Now all we need to do is to perform some experiments and figure out what type of singing/music genre provides the best stress relief. I'm thinking reggae would do the trick personally... >_>
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So... they want to grow marijuana on Mars?
Being funny is my sig nature.
...splintering the first 100 and causing the transntaionals to crack down. And don't get me started on the great Earth flood. I think stressed out plants on Red Mars (or Green Mars or Blue Mars) is the least of our worries...
We should send a bunch of kudzu to mars. That stuff will grow anywhere.
Badass Resumes
I'm not criticising.. but surely research into plants that can take extremes is of more short-term utility in creating species which can suck up and withhold pollutants as part of a clean-up operation for Earth than in sustaining the "great-post-armageddon-earth-bug-out" destination?
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Plants will grow if their stress levels are reduced while astronauts die from being exposed to cosmic radiation. Somebody must love plants.
If this stress thing applies to people too... how are they going to have any IT staff on Mars?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
I think if you are engineering life for Mars you need to be developing cold tolerance, more than heat tolerance which is what this experiment seems to be doing. The concept is the same but you have to wonder why they they made their choice of extremeophiles. The averge surface temperature on Mars is around -55C. The hottest you see is 27C which is a very warm summer day. Developing tolerance for 4-100C doesn't quite fit.
You wonder why they aren't working with extremeophiles from the Arctic, Antarctic and high mountains instead of ocean vents.
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Wouldn't this contaminate the soil of mars, by introducing lifeforms from another planet? I mean, we still have a lot of research left to do on mars, and I don't think putting plants to grow on mars is going to help at all.
How could we possibly want to live in a planet filled with holes from meteorites? That's the question!
scientists hope to breed plants that can handle the wide range of temperatures that will be found on Mars.
Just come to Ottawa (Canada). Minus 35 C in the winter, plus 35 C in the summer! And I see corn growing across the street. Why am I living here again...might as well move to Mars.
PCB
'Men never commit evil so fully and joyfully as when they do it for religious convictions.' B. Pascal
They should start with apple(not Apple). After all, they too deserve their own sin.
Let the Terra Forming begin, what is the idea behind this? Are the plants going to release oxygen?
I 'm curious about this but I know nothing about the subject someone please enlighten me.
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grow the fuck up, get a damned job, and start pulling your own weight. ...and pull up your fucking pants, too! Do you know how really fucking stupid that looks?
Have plants, but the air will stay to thin to breath anyway. Harvest oxygen from outside air to live under domes, or hope to find that alien air making machine buried under a mountain (to be activated by Arnold only).
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
> food, oxygen, companionship and a patch of green far from home.
1,2,4 are a given...but companionship?
Come on, plants are just plain ordinary. I'd much rather live with a pet martian rock than a pet plant!
The unofficial
Your local dope dealer will be pushing Martian "Red" and saying "Yhis shit is out of this world."
Where will it end? With the genetic modification of people to survive the temperatures and atmosphere of Mars?
Also, just because you modify plant life to survive in the conditions of Mars does not mean it will multiply and flourish. These species of plants were not meant to grow in those conditions.
Of course, cannabis is the answer!
they actually performed an experiment with plants growing next to a boombox. The ones growing to hip-hop did the best ...
that'd probably be a fairly cheap way to destress the plants over there. bring a bunch of hip-hop cd's to mars and play them 24-7 for the martian plants to under. :)
Okay, so with these genes the plants won't shut down due to stress and will continue to grow anyway. But how fast can you expect any plant to grow at -20C or lower, or with hardly any atmosphere?
Taken from the "Mars University" episode. Fry: Very impressive. Back in the 20th century we had no idea there was a university on Mars. Farnsworth: Well back in those days Mars was just a dreary, uninhabitable wasteland, uh much like Utah. But unlike Utah, it was eventually made livable, when the university was founded in 2636. Leela: They planted traditional college foliage: ivy, trees, hemp. Soon the whole planet was terraformed. Fry: Does that mean it's safe to breathe the air?
The proposed research isn't reducing the plants' stress, but making them more tolerant of the stresses.
If you want to reduce their stress, don't send them to Mars!
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
By splicing genes from Earth-bound extremophiles into seeds whose descendants are destined
What? Having destined descendants has effect on the outcome of your intermediate test results? Science replaced be self fulfilling theorems?
So they went to NASA, cuz they'll fund anything.
A recent study be me found that it is easier to get people into orbit on a space elevator if they are lighter. I'm going to submit this with the triumphant headline:
Reducing bodyweight leads to SPACE ELEVATOR!
Why? Because the probable time to disassemble Mars is 12 hours once the asteroids have been developed into an array to harvest the entire solar power output of the sun. [1]
So any work to "develop" Mars is either (1) assuming that nanotechnology is impossible -- which seems to fly in the face of physical laws as well as much NASA funding; or perhaps (2) that it will take a very very long time to become available (which would imply the people at NASA are *not* following the Moore's Law data...; or (3) that for some romantic reasons decisions will be made to not disassemble Mars -- and this is the realm of politics and requires a mandatory behavioral enforcement dictate unlike any humanity has been able to develop or dictate over thousands of years.
I for one would like to see the carefully reasoned and thought out discussions that Mars will still exist in 30-40 years. For NASA to be funding efforts involving growing life on Mars points out how short sighted they are and how poorly they are educating the students they are educating.
Instead of enzyme studies which will be pointless -- how about some studies of more advanced methods that might be used to disassemble Mars more quickly?
1. Life at the Limits of Physical Laws
Does anyone else have a question mark above their head after reading this?
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Hm. Some of us don't go to Fark. /. /.
1. Blocked because of ads and certain links.
2. Same as above, exept volentarily.
3. Prefer the sorting/longer descriptions of
4. ????
5. The in-jokes of
6. Um, profit?
Oh who am I kidding?
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You seem to suggest that creating a Dyson sphere is possible in the same timeframe as very early terraforming...given that we don't have any tech. capable of the kind of thing you're talking about, but that we do have genetic splicing for extremophile organisms, I think you're optimistic.
More on Dyson spheres:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere
Until we get some beneficial soil-based baterias introduced, no root-based plants can take life on Mars unless potted.
Maybe, those 1000-year old pine tree (Joshua) may cut it in such a hostile environment (takes a little potted soil to get it started altho).
Mosses, popping misteltoes, and fungus have the best anchor in such a hostile environment.
Finding species that survive martian weather is easy task. Predicting how the species influence future Mars exploration by human race is not.
Just look what rabbits did to Australia. Imagine that rabbits are stress tolerant and can survive radiation, deep freezing, boiling, lack of oxygen and eat anything that is available, especially protein rich candies wrapped in space suits.
Just don't send up a batch of sicklepod and you will be fine I should think...http://www.cbu.edu/sciences/biology/Debbie UM/sld022.htm
Seems like thay've done enough damage here!
So, what is the motivation behind growing GMO infested "plants" on Mars? Seriously. This is not a retorical question.
hemp
One would think that the earth has good enough weeds already. Just take some dandelion seeds to Mars. I'm sure they will grow beautifully...
Oh well, what the hell...
Just throw a bunch of weeds and other plants up there and see if any adapt and survive? If not, we'll then we've got some organic material to try to plant then next batch in. ;-)
The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.
Plants need oxygen too. On earth, they produce more oxygen than they consume, but they still need to be submerged in a sea of oxygen to function. If all the oxygen they produced was sucked away by osmotic pressure, the plants would die pretty quickly. Or did you think plants made glucose for you.
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(Actually, recent research has shown that it's pretty much useless, except that echinacea tea fits into the "drink lots of hot liquids" set of advice just like hot tap water does.)
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New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
see previous articles about reggae...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Of course, anybody who's trying to teach their plants to meditate has probably been smoking some of them first...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
As a practicing plant molecular biologist with friends on the NASA Mars pork barrel train, I feel qualified to call the spin on this research bogus. We sit around at meetings drinking beer and lauighing about how much money NASA gives us for stupid ideas which will never be realized because radiation will kill any astronauts long before they get to Mars (see story ~3 days ago). The shielding required to protect humans for this trip weighs too much for this to ever really happen. The enzyme these researchers put into plants only functions down to four degrees celcius. Boy, that will really help on Mars. The results they get will be that you may be able to enigineer plants to survive stress using this enzyme. There are many existing ways of doing this. This kind of research is routine and the normal goal is to produce hardier plants for here on earth. I'm all for funding basic (plant biology) research, but who are they trying to fool with this kind of ? The undergrads in their class?
First of all, IAAPP (plant physiologist). I have a considerable amount of critics on this work. Some of which i will mention here:)
What they did was move some genes from an archaeon into tobacco cells. wow. Big deal. This is just some fancy molecular biology. But it does not _in any way_ do something to let a plant become more stress tolerant.
First of all, its is Nicotiana tabacum, not tobacum. But of course, they wouldn't know. They probably did not ever see the plant growing at all. Yep, that's right, they use a suspension culture. Imagine putting this gene into some human stem cell line. How close to a stress tolerant human will you be?
Secondly, what they put into a plant is a gene encoding for superoxide reductase. This gets rid of free radicals in some thermofiles. This is nice, but of course, plants have there own _very complex_ systems to get rid of oxigen radicals already. The advantage here seems to me that the archaeon protein is heat stable. Well, to me it seems not very useful on a planet with an average temperature of below 0.....
But the real point I want to make is against the idea that you can use a bacterial system for improving a plant. It is not that simple. Much more could be learned from actually studying the specific environment for which you need plants, and then find a similar habitat on earth. Find out how plants in that habitat cope with that environment. And move that system into the plants of your choice.
Moving a few heat stable proteins into tobacco is not going to make it heat resistant. There are to many systems in that plant that would need heat stable proteins. And even then, there is more than just proteins. Many chemical processes are going to act completely out of normal parameters at T>50. Your plant will die quickly, even with a 100% Archaeon certified (TM) proteins.
This work is useless. If you want to do this, find people who actually understand plants.
That depends on your point of view.
However, morality aside, there may be practical (e.g., biological and/or economic) reasons for trying to preserve microbial life.
P.S. If there are microbes there, then the planet isn't really dead, now is it?
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Yeah, but the researchers must have some idea of how they plan to tackle those problem, or else why bother?
Well, I hazard they probably do have some ideas, but that they're vague speculation at best. The goal of creating organisms to live on Mars may be an ultimate goal, but I read their comments as saying they don't propose making that touchdown themselves -- they feel they're just moving the ball down the field a bit.
I thought it was always below freezing on Mars.
Oh no. It gets up to 60-70F or so. Well above freezing for most of the day in the lower latitudes, I believe.
[I]f the total barometric pressure is so low that liquid water always boils, how can even a plant built like the toughest cactus hope to exchange gases with the Martian atmosphere and not dry out?
Well, plants generally do actively dry in this way on Earth. That is, the liquid water they take in through the roots generally exits as vapor through the leaves, and often at quite a high rate. This isn't because of the low total pressure, but because the partial pressure of water in the atmosphere is often well below the vapor pressure of water. In other words, as long as the relative humidity is less than 100%, liquid water will evaporate from plants.
IIRC massive transpiration is actually necessary for tall trees to hoist nutrients via sap flow up to the crown. As the water evaporates out of the leaves it pulls the sap column up the tree.
Anyway, the key to not drying out is to take in as much liquid water via the roots as you're losing via the leaves. Hence the necessity for liquid water in growing plants on Mars. But a low atmospheric pressure, and a low vapor pressure of water, don't seem to mean much more than that transpiration is maybe faster than it might otherwise be.
Remarkably, there seem to be few to no Earth organisms that are capable of pulling water directly out of the air. Even the lichens and bacteria that live in the driest conditions seem usually to simply wait around until liquid water briefly appears and absorb that, then husband the stuff very carefully. There are supposedly some high-altitude lichens that might pull water directly from air, but this hasn't been fully confirmed as far as I know.
I would have to say that plants don't get much more relaxed and stress free than the one and only, mighty "Sticky Purple Punch" Plant!
*snickers* *coughs* *grins widely* *goes looking for brownies*
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