So are there differences between the lettuce from Earth and from space? Let’s find out.

The researchers didn’t find any difference in nutrients between the plants grown on Earth and the plants grown on the ISS. That’s great! But they did see some differences between the 3 years they grew crops.

All the lettuce tested negative for E. coli and Salmonella, which is also good news for space travel.

Now let’s look at the bacteria. The researchers found there was actually a lot more bacteria that grew on lettuce on the ISS than lettuce grown on the ground. And you can see that in this graph. The x-axis is the three years they tested. The y-axis is the number of bacterial colonies that grew on the researchers’ petri dishes. And it’s actually a log scale so we can visualize the data more easily. In X you can see the results from lettuce grown on the ISS and in X you can see the results from lettuce grown on Earth.

The researchers also found that there was greater diversity of bacteria on the roots than there was on the leaves, regardless of where the lettuce was grown.