A Test to Verify the Biocompatibility of a Method for Plant Culture in a Microgravity Environment by Brown and Chapman is an example of the basic science people needed to do with the shuttle.

If you’re going to run plant experiments, then the plants will need to perform basic function in order to live. One example is taking up water and this was a problem. Soviet experiments and theoretical work suggested the way plants reacted to soil moisture in orbit was very different to how they behaved on Earth. This would have a major effect on any experiment results because unusual behaviour could be due to whatever it was you were experimenting for, or it could just be the way it goes in microgravity.

STS-3 carried what NASA called ‘bio-engineering tests’ to see if botanical experiments with their systems were practical. The test has HEFLEX, the Helianthus Flight Experiment. The question HEFLEX was to look at was how sunflower nutation happened in orbit. This is the spinning effect of the stem in growing seedlings. You can see Arabidopsis doing this in the time-lapse video below.