Sunday Supplement: The First Plant to Flower in Space
In the early space station era, scientists were beginning to think that plants would never flower in space.
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The Guinness World Record for the ‘first species of plant to flower in space’ is held by…
drum roll please…
…Arabidopsis.
We could probably have guessed that, what with Arabidopsis being “the little plant that could” of scientific research. The poor thing gets described as the plant equivalent of a lab mouse or a fruit fly. It’s small size and short lifecycle make it ideal for experiments, plus its entire genome was sequenced in 2000.
So, anyway, it’s 1982. And something remarkable is happening on the Soviet Union’s Salyut-7 space station.
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