I am a botanist.
Hello, I am Christina Johnson, and #iAmABotanist
I grew plants in space as part of my PhD. Most of the folks that follow me here on social media know this about me.
As a Postdoctoral researcher I applied what I learned about the early stages of plant development in spaceflight to a novel crop called microgreens. I worked alongside engineers to develop hardware that would allow us to grow microgreens as an appealing crop in simulated microgravity. We took that hardware a step beyond and developed a series of hardware types that could both grow and harvest microgreens in microgravity, and we tested them in a parabolic flight. That was pretty awesome work. I also was part of the Gene Lab Plant Analysis Working Group, and was an author on a paper where we compared the transcriptomes of plants grown in past spaceflight experiments.
I did some really neat research and met a lot of fantastically brilliant people who helped me out along the way.
But did you know that I had a traditional botanical education?
I spent quite a bit of time at botanical gardens and herbaria throughout my undergraduate and graduate education.
Botanic/al gardens are tasked with preserving biodiversity by keeping plants alive and propagating them to share with other botanic gardens, and the public through plant sales. They are living museums. When you walk through a botanic garden, you are walking through a time capsule in a sense. Plants that are now endangered are often brought back from the brink of extinction, thanks to their efforts.
An herbarium is a very different type of plant museum. This is where the representative specimens of each individual plant specie is preserved. The plants are collected in the field, pressed by a plant press, dried, and eventually mounted carefully onto sheets of high quality paper. Sometimes the specimens are mounted with cloth tape, other times they are hand stitched with thread. Each specimen contains details about the location and time when they were collected.
There are some very old plant specimens housed in these facilities, and there are new specimens coming in every day. These museums that are filled with living and preserved plant specimens still make essential contributions to the field of botany around the Earth.
But what about in space?
There is no herbarium nor botanical garden for spaceflight-grown plants.
We only have data.
And I get to be a part of figuring out how to not only preserve it for the future, but also make it openly available to the world.
I love my job.
I am a Plant Data Curator for NASA's Open Science Data Repository.
Open Science for Life in Space.
Learn more about what we do on our website.
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