After more than a year of delays, a WSU professor’s experiment with alfalfa ready to blast off to the International Space Station

Louis Pasteur, the French chemist and microbiologist most known for developing the germ theory of disease, once said that in the field of observation, chance favors only the prepared mind.

Over the past year, Norman Lewis, a professor of biological chemistry at Washington State University, has had plenty of time to prepare his mind for what’s next.

The project he’s been working on, along with 20 others, six of whom are from WSU, seeks to explore how nitrogen fixation works in legumes, like alfalfa, when exposed to a zero-gravity environment.

Lewis originally expected his experiment to return from the International Space Station and into the safe confines of his lab by February of this year. But due to issues beyond his control, he’s had to wait more than a year for his experiment to reach the International Space Station. The reason it’s taken so long to launch, he said, is because NASA has changed subcontractors three times.

Luckily for Lewis and his team, NASA has sent $480,000 in additional funding since the project was delayed. The money is being used to modify the project appropriately, set up an on-the-ground equivalent, and conduct further experiments at WSU and the Kennedy Space Center.

Nitrogen fixation is a process where atmospheric nitrogen is converted into ammonia that plants can use as fertilizer. This is made possible through bacteria in the soil, called rhizobia, that takes nitrogen from the air and combines it with oxygen and hydrogen to form compounds that acts as fuel for the plant.

Lewis and his team are specifically studying legumes, which are known for producing seeds in pods, because they interact well with rhizobia. The combination of rhizobia and legumes creates root nodules that are favorable for nitrogen fixation.

Lewis is also looking at the lignin levels in alfalfa. Lewis compared the lignin in plants to bones in the human body. In short, it acts as structural support. The issue is that the more lignin a plant has, the harder it is for the plant to degrade, which poses a problem for potential future space explorers.

As our species looks to colonize distant planets, scientists need plants with lower lignin levels to still function and grow appropriately in order to limit the amount of resources we demand from our home planet.

“If you have lower lignin levels in the plant, you can convert that material, that you’d call a sort of waste product, you can convert it back into things that the next generation of plants can now utilize,” Lewis said.

Lewis admitted there are a couple of things he’s concerned about, such as cosmic radiation, ethylene and a lack of proper lighting. Ethylene is a kind of odorless gas that emits from materials used to build the space station. It also accelerates plant growth and disrupts the relationship between rhizobia bacteria and the alfalfa. There are ethylene scrubbers on board that Lewis imagines will solve the problem, but only time will tell.

Along with 11,000 pounds of science experiments and supplies aboard NASA’s Northrop Grumman CRS-24, Lewis’s experiment is set to launch from Cape Canaveral on Saturday around 7:40 a.m. The experiment containing 288 alfalfa seeds will last six weeks, but Lewis probably won’t physically see the fruits of his labor until October, if everything goes according to plan.

Apart from the impetus for future space exploration, Lewis said this work is important because it’s rooted in humanity’s connection with the only place we’ve ever really known.

“Astronauts and cosmonauts enjoy tending to plants because it’s a reminder of home,” he said. “If you were to be inside a small capsule or space station, and you never saw a flower or a green thing for a period of year … When you grow plants, it brings back all the memories of what’s on Earth.”