American scientists have grown plants in soil from the moon for the first time. The discovery that plants can germinate in alien soil could be of great importance for future space missions, but may also have applications here on Earth.
“Everything germinated. We were really surprised,” says one of the scientists, Anna-Lisa Paul, enthusiastically. “We were really perplexed, we had not predicted this.”
The researchers had previously grown plants in terrestrial soil that closely resembles lunar soil. That is why, in exceptional cases, NASA gave them the opportunity to conduct another experiment with real lunar dust: the team was given 12 grams of material collected during Apollo missions 11, 12 and 17.
The team used tiny flower pots the size of a thimble to germinate the plants. Each time 1 gram of soil, nutrients, water and some seeds of the flower Arabidopsis were placed in it. This plant was chosen because it is rigid and its entire genome has been mapped.
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