RNA is a Piece of Cake

Have you heard words like gene, DNA, and RNA thrown around, but aren’t quite sure what they mean? Are you fuzzy on the difference between a genome and transcriptome? Read on then. This post is for you, and I promise by the end, you will find that all those fancy sounding science terms are a […]

Lab Chores

“There’s much more dishwashing in science than the movies led me to believe,” exclaimed a colleague of mine. Never were truer words spoken. Many folks think that scientists spend their days stirring steaming beakers, messing with DNA, or poking at whirring machines. Indeed, I will do those things for my space botany project, but much […]

Laying the Groundwork

When I tell people that got a NC Space Grant Fellowship for plant biology research, the first question I get asked is “So when do your plants go to space?” When I reply, “They don’t. My plants will be in the lab,” I get quizzical looks. What most people don’t realize is that most space […]

Featured

Welcome, Fellow Explorer

Thanks for joining my journey to explore space biology as a graduate student in Plant and Microbial Biology at NC State University. I will be working on a plant biology project funded by NASA through the NC Space Grant. My project strives to unravel part of the mystery of how plants sense light and gravity, […]

Change of Course

In the long distant past of 2019, I made a leap of faith and applied to grad school in the Plant and Microbial Biology Department of NC State University. I was thrilled to be accepted to join a plant biology lab with a history of space biology research. Despite the craziness of the pandemic, I […]

Growing Beyond Earth

I have not been idle in the space biology realm during my period of radio silence. I formed a team for the NASA and Fairchild Garden Growing Beyond Earth Maker Challenge and we’ve been busy tinkering away. This year’s “SPACE Garden” challenge was to design a system that would grow as many lettuce plants as […]

Yeast in Spaaace: Part 2

As I discussed in Part 1 of this blog series, I decided to launch my amateur exploration in space biology by sending up some mutant brewer’s yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae strain HA1) in a high altitude balloon (HAB) with the help of NC Nearspace Research. I was hoping to replicate an experiment by Bernhard Beck-Winchatz and […]

Yeast In Spaaace: Part 1

Why send yeast to near space? I’ve long dreamed of doing biology research in space. Unfortunately, the wait list for NASA experiments is long, and mere mortals like myself with no institutional support or funding stand little chance of getting an experiment onto the ISS. High altitude model rocketry and independent satellites are likewise out […]

Archived: Welcome, fellow explorer

Edit: This is the old intro post for the blog. I’m keeping it for historical purposes, but the focus of this blog has shifted towards the space biology research I will be doing as a grad student. There will also be plenty of DIY activities for folks who follow this blog. Thanks for joining my […]