A First:Plants grow in lunar soil brought to Earth by Apollo Astronauts @TheCosmosNews

#thecosmosnews Plants can grow in lunar soil. They don’t love it — they become stressed, and may turn purple after initially looking green — but they can still germinate in lunar soil, send roots through it, sprout leaves, get bigger and potentially be edible. That’s the remarkable result of an experiment conducted by researchers at the University of Florida who planted seeds in samples of lunar rock and dust brought home a half-century ago by the Apollo astronauts. The study, published Thursday in the journal Nature Communications Biology and funded by NASA, is the first known example of plants being grown in lunar soil, said co-author Anna-Lisa Paul, a University of Florida plant molecular biologist. Paul and her colleague and co-author, Robert Ferl, sought four grams of lunar soil from NASA and wound up with 12 grams — four each from three missions: 11, 12 and 17. They planted seeds of the fast-growing, weedy plant thale cress, or arabidopsis. They had no idea what to expect when they first added water to the samples. The soil had been sealed and archived at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. The samples had never been exposed to air, liquid water or any of the other pleasantries of Earth. “We didn’t know if they were going to blow up. We didn’t know if they were going to fizzle and bubble,” Paul said. They did not blow up. They did not do anything at all, in fact: The samples were extremely hydrophobic, and repelled water as if it were the most disgusting thing ever invented. Researchers labored to get the lunar soil to gradually soak up water. They also added a nutrient solution. But what happened next was further proof that, as Jeff Goldblum’s character famously put it in the movie “Jurassic Park,” “life finds a way.” The plants germinated, and began to leaf out. They struggled, some more than others, depending on where the soil samples came from. The soil scooped from the surface by the Apollo 11 astronauts was not as congenial to growth as that from the two later Apollo missions.