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Marshall Porterfield, associate professor of agricultural and biological
engineering, floats in the “vomit comet” A NASA-modified DC-9 with reduced
gravity environment.
Dr. Porterfield suggests that plants sense gravity through a process that develops
a bioelectric field within plant cells. He and colleagues test a new type of
biosensor capable of measuring ion currents in multiple locations around a single
cell in this microgravity environment. The MISA chip — for microfluidic ion sensor
array — is a collection of sensors that detect ion motion in very small volumes of
a sample.