Anna-Lisa Paul, Ph.D.

Expert Bio

Dr. Paul is a Research Associate Professor and Graduate Faculty in the Horticultural Sciences department at the University of Florida. She has B.A. in Botany (1980), an M.S. in Plant Physiology, and Physiological Ecology (1984), a Ph.D. in Plant Molecular Genetics and Epigenetics (1989), with postdoctoral experience in DNA architecture, chromatin structure, and gene regulation. Paul is a plant molecular biologist with an interest in how plants respond to abiotic stress, particularly at the gene expression level. Venues associated with spaceflight provide an opportunity to explore plant genomic responses to a novel environment; one that is outside the evolutionary experience of terrestrial organisms. This unique platform presents a background by which adaptive strategies at the gene expression level can be observed as they are adopted to cope with a stress de novo. Paul and her colleague Robert Ferl have launched and analyzed five spaceflight experiments: a sortie on Shuttle Columbia (STS-93) in 1999, three telemetric and gene expression experiments on STS-129, -130 and -131, and also a BRIC-16 gene expression experiment on STS-131. In addition, Paul and Ferl just finished an additional spaceflight experiment (BRIC-17 – CEL), which launched and returned with SpaceX-2. The research associated with these experiments relate to evaluating the effects of the spaceflight environment on the patterns of signal transduction and gene expression in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana with state-of-the-art molecular biology and genetic techniques, as well as new technologies (developed with NASA KSC engineers) in telemetric image collection for remote sensing of gene expression events in real time. These data have provided new insights into the mechanisms by which eukaryotic organisms sense and respond to their environment at the molecular level.