Ferl is a distinguished professor, inaugural director of the Astraeus Space Institute, and assistant vice president for UF Research. Paul is a professor and director of UF’s Interdisciplinary Center for Biotechnology Research and a leading plant molecular biologist.

What does the adaptation process look like for plants in space?

That’s the question the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS) hopes to answer with a novel space-based experiment happening on Thursday, August 29th, at 9 a.m. EST when a UF/IFAS horticultural sciences researcher launches with his experiment into suborbital space on a Blue Origin New Shepard rocket.

Rob Ferl, Ph.D., the University of Florida Astraeus Space Institute director, will fly in the Blue Origin craft and perform the experiment himself. The experiment builds on prior research that showed a type of plant – Arabidopsis thaliana – can detect that it is in space and then change how its genes are expressed.