{"id":245547,"date":"2026-10-17T01:34:04","date_gmt":"2026-10-17T06:34:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/10\/plants-shift-gene-activity-within-minutes-of-entering-spaceflight-experiment-reveals"},"modified":"2026-10-17T01:34:04","modified_gmt":"2026-10-17T06:34:04","slug":"plants-shift-gene-activity-within-minutes-of-entering-spaceflight-experiment-reveals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/10\/plants-shift-gene-activity-within-minutes-of-entering-spaceflight-experiment-reveals","title":{"rendered":"Plants shift gene activity within minutes of entering spaceflight, experiment reveals"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/plants-shift-gene-activity-within-minutes-of-entering-spaceflight-experiment-reveals2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Plants begin responding to spaceflight almost immediately after leaving Earth, according to a new University of Florida study that captured the earliest stages of biological adaptation during a commercial suborbital mission. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41526-026-00645-6\" target=\"_blank\">Published<\/a> in the journal <i>npj Microgravity<\/i>, the study reports the results of an experiment conducted by a UF astronaut during Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard NS-26 flight on Aug. 29, 2024.<\/p>\n<p>For more than two decades, UF space biologists Rob Ferl and Anna-Lisa Paul have worked together to understand how living organisms respond to spaceflight. For this study, they designed an experiment to capture biological changes during different phases of a mission.<\/p>\n<p>Scientists have long studied how plants and other organisms respond after spending days, weeks or months in space. Much less has been known about the biological changes that occur during the first minutes of spaceflight and how those responses change as a mission unfolds.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Plants begin responding to spaceflight almost immediately after leaving Earth, according to a new University of Florida study that captured the earliest stages of biological adaptation during a commercial suborbital mission. Published in the journal npj Microgravity, the study reports the results of an experiment conducted by a UF astronaut during Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,1514],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-245547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biological","category-space-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=245547"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245547\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=245547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=245547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=245547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}