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Mossy Space Spirals
Samples of fire moss that travel onboard the space shuttle do something odd: they spiral. Scientists say its a clue to the fundamental inner workings of plant cells.
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July 16, 2002
Biologist Fred Sack carefully lifted a petri dish from the tray. Inside were precious samples of moss just back from a two-week voyage aboard space shuttle Columbia. He glanced at the growing clumps, blinked, then looked closer.
"It was not what I expected to see," recalls Sack. His moss was growing in a spiral.
Moss from space shuttle Columbia (STS-87) shows spiral growth patterns that emerged in low-gravity.
On Earth, moss spores that take root send out hundreds of tiny filaments known as protonemata. These filaments normally grow in an unruly fashion; they make a messy-looking tangle. But the moss onboard Columbia did something different. As if choreographed, the protonemata swirled together in the same direction. They formed a distinctive clockwise spiral like no moss on Earth.
"It's the kind of thing," says Sack, "where the shuttle lands, they deliver your tray, you carefully take the dishes out of the hardware and you're ready to start doing some photography. Then all of a sudden you just look at the cultures, and WOW! You know right away it was not random growth."
That was four years ago. Sack, who is a professor at Ohio State University (OSU), has studied the spirals ever since, yet they remain a mystery.
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Cheers,
Dan
Mossy Space Spirals . . .