Plants on Mars

As part of a proposed mission that could put plants on Mars as soon as 2007, University of Florida professor Rob Ferl is bioengineering tiny mustard plants. He's not altering these plants so that they can adapt more easily to Martian conditions. Instead, he's adding reporter genes: part plant, part glowing jellyfish -- so that these diminutive explorers can send messages back to Earth about how they are faring on another planet.Right: Green-glowing Arabidopsis thaliana for a future pioneer of Mars? Rob Ferl and the University of Florida. The plants can be genetically wired to glow with a soft green aura when they encounter problems. Within a garden grouping, some plants could report (by glowing) low oxygen levels, while others might signal low water or, say, the wrong mix of nutrients in the soil. Thriving plants won't glow at all. They'll look like normal mustard. But plants struggling to survive will emit a soft green light, a signal to researchers that something is amiss. A camera onboard the lander would record the telltale glows and then relay the signal back to Earth. No humans are required on the scene -- a big advantage for such a far away experiment. The plants' designer genes consist of two parts: a sensor side to detect stress and a reporter side to trigger the glow