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Growing Plants in Space

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NASA's Matt Romeyn works in the Crop Food Production Research Area of the Space Station Processing
Facility at the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
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(/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/scott_kelly_zinnia_bouquet.jpg
Astronaut Scott Kelly nursed dying space zinnias back to health
on the International Space Station. He photographed a bouquet
of the flowers in the space station's cupola against the backdrop
of Earth and shared the photo to his Instagram for Valentine's
Day 2016.
Credits: NASA/Scott Kelly
()

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11/6/2020 Growing Plants in Space | NASA

(/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/ksc-
20180312-ph_nas01_0001.jpg)
The first growth test of crops in the Advanced Plant Habitat
aboard the International Space Station yielded great results.
Arabidopsis seeds - small flowering plants related to cabbage
and mustard - grew for about six weeks, and dwarf wheat for five
weeks.
Credits: NASA

As humans explore space, we will want to bring plants for both aesthetic and
practical reasons. We already know from our pioneering astronauts that fresh
flowers and gardens on the International Space Station create a beautiful
atmosphere and let us take a little piece of Earth with us on our journeys.
They’re good for our psychological well-being on Earth and in space. They also
will be critical for keeping astronauts healthy on long-duration missions.

A lack of vitamin C was all it took to give sailors scurvy, and vitamin deficiencies
can cause a number of other health problems. Simply packing some multi-
vitamins will not be enough to keep astronauts healthy as they explore deep
space. They will need fresh produce.

Right now on the space station, astronauts receive regular shipments of a wide
variety of freeze-dried and prepackaged meals to cover their dietary needs –
resupply missions keep them freshly stocked. When crews venture further into
space, traveling for months or years without resupply shipments, the vitamins in
prepackaged form break down over time, which presents a problem for
astronaut health.  

NASA is looking at ways to provide astronauts with nutrients in a long-lasting,

easily absorbed form—freshly grown fresh fruits and vegetables. The challenge
is how to do that in a closed environment without sunlight or Earth’s gravity.

Veggie

The Vegetable Production System, known as Veggie, is a space garden residing

on the space station. Veggie’s purpose is to help NASA study plant growth in
microgravity, while adding fresh food to the astronauts’ diet and enhancing
happiness and well-being on the orbiting laboratory. The Veggie garden is about
the size of a carry-on piece of luggage and typically holds six plants. Each plant
grows in a “pillow” filled with a clay-based growth media and fertilizer. The
pillows are important to help distribute water, nutrients and air in a healthy
balance around the roots. Otherwise, the roots would either drown in water or
be engulfed by air because of the way fluids in space tend to form bubbles.

In the absence of gravity, plants use other environmental factors, such as light,
to orient and guide growth. A bank of light emitting diodes (LEDs) above the
plants produces a spectrum of light suited for the plants’ growth. Since plants
reflect a lot of green light and use more red and blue wavelengths, the Veggie
chamber typically glows magenta pink.

To date, Veggie has successfully grown a variety of plants, including three types
of lettuce, Chinese cabbage, mizuna mustard, red Russian kale and zinnia

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11/6/2020 Growing Plants in Space | NASA
flowers. The flowers were especially popular with astronaut Scott Kelly, who
picked a bouquet and photographed it floating in the cupola against the
backdrop of Earth. Some of the plants were harvested and eaten by the crew
members, with remaining samples returned to Earth to be analyzed. One
concern was harmful microbes growing on the produce. So far, no harmful
contamination has been detected, and the food has been safe (and enjoyable)
for the crew to eat.
Our team at Kennedy Space Center envisions planting more produce in the
future, such as tomatoes and peppers. Foods like berries, certain beans and
other antioxidant-rich foods would have the added benefit of providing some
space radiation protection for crew members who eat them.

Veggie Fact Sheet

(https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/veggie_fact_sheet_508.pdf)
 

Advanced Plant Habitat

The Advanced Plant Habitat (APH), like Veggie, is a growth chamber on station
for plant research. It uses LED lights and a porous clay substrate with controlled
release fertilizer to deliver water, nutrients and oxygen to the plant roots.

But unlike Veggie, it is enclosed and automated with cameras and more than
180 sensors that are in constant interactive contact with a team on the ground
at Kennedy, so it doesn’t need much day-to-day care from the crew. Its water
recovery and distribution, atmosphere content, moisture levels and temperature
are all automated. It has more colors of LED lights than Veggie, with red, green,
and blue lights, but also white, far red and even infrared to allow for nighttime
imaging.

When a harvest is ready for research studies, the crew collects samples from
the plants, freezes or chemically fixes them to preserve them, and sends them
back down to Earth to be studied so scientists can better understand how
space affected their growth and development.

APH had its first test run on the space station in Spring 2018 using Arabidopsis
thaliana (the “white mouse of the plant research world”) and dwarf wheat. The
time-lapse video of this was a popular social media release from the space
station worldwide.

Dr. Norman Lewis is the principal investigator for the Arabidopsis Gravitational
Response Omics (Arabidopsis-GRO) consortium study, which will be the first
study using APH. He and his collaborators are especially interested in what
happens to plants in space at the gene, protein and metabolite level, and what
changes occur and why.

A key question they want to answer is the relationship between microgravity

and plant lignin content. Lignins in plants have functions whose closest analogy
is that of bones in humans. They give structure and rigidity to plants and the
means to stand upright against gravity. We already know space causes bone
and muscle loss in humans because the physical demands are lower in space.
So what about lignins?

Lewis and his team also want to know if plants genetically engineered to have
less lignin can survive and function normally in space. This could give space-
grown plants several advantages, including being better for nutrient absorption
when humans eat them and in making plant waste easier for composting. Lewis
and his team believe this fundamental science information will guide our
strategies for deep space exploration and colonization. 

Lewis knows space science has come a long way already — and that the
possibilities on the horizon were previously the world of fiction!

Biological Research in Canisters

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11/6/2020 Growing Plants in Space | NASA
The Biological Research in Canisters (BRIC) is a facility used to study the
effects of space on organisms small enough to grow in petri dishes, such as
yeast and microbes. BRIC-LED is the latest version, which added light-emitting
diodes (LEDs) to support biology such as plants, mosses, algae and
cyanobacteria that need light to make their food.

Right now, BRIC-LED is undergoing hardware validation tests. Scientists want

to ensure the LEDs don’t get too hot for the plants and do other system checks.
Soon, researchers such as Dr. Simon Gilroy of the University of Wisconsin-
Madison will use it to conduct studies.

Gilroy is interested in how the Arabidopsis plant’s gene expression changes in

space. “There are literally thousands of experiments done on Earth [on
Arabidopsis],” Gilroy explains. “Cold shock. Touched them. Not watered them.
Too much water. Shouted at them,” he says with a chuckle. “Those databases
are all available to us. So we look and see if there are any patterns anyone has
found and what on the ground mimics what happens in space.”

Some patterns that arise are expected, like when the genes associated with
gravity become altered. But two patterns that have caught Gilroy’s attention
have to do with the plants’ immune system.

The plants seem to have increased stress from oxidation. Normal chemistry in
the cells makes a very reactive oxygen-based chemical. Uncontrolled, this
“reactive oxygen species” can react with the machinery that repairs DNA and
mess that up, or it can damage mitochondria. In a healthy plant, the cells have
ways of dealing with it. But in space, plants are making more of it.

The other pattern is certain genes associated with the immune system turn on
and others switch off in space. Scientists suspect this may compromise that
plants’ ability to fight off infections.

There is anecdotal evidence, too, that plants in space may be struggling to fend
off pathogens. Once, the zinnias in Veggie got a little overwatered, and there
was a lack of air flow. A fungus started growing on the plants, and some died.
Astronaut Scott Kelly delicately cleaned off the fungus, nursed the surviving
plants back to health and got them to flower. It could have been a fluke, but it
raised the question if space was weakening the zinnia’s health.

Rather than intentionally making Veggie plants sick to test this theory, scientists
want to run gene expression studies using BRIC-LED and trick plants into
thinking they’re being threatened. They do this by manipulating protein
receptors on the plants, which are constantly on the lookout for signs of
bacteria.

Bacteria use a whip-like structure called a flagellum to help them swim, and
flagella all share a common set of 22 amino acids nicknamed “flag-22.” Plants
are looking for flag-22, and their defense systems kick on as soon as they pick
up on it. Scientists can squirt a harmless solution of flag-22 onto the plants.
“The plant freaks out and thinks it’s being attacked,” Gilroy explains.

In the BRIC-LED experiment, tiny plants are grown for 10 days, and then
scientists squirt them with flag-22. An hour later, the plants are fully defending
themselves, and scientists douse them with a chemical fixative to stop all
biological processes. This fixative does a great job of preserving the plants’
response state, but as an added step, the plants are put into a deep freeze. The
plants are later sent back down to Earth and ground up to have their RNA
extracted and analyzed.

Gilroy hopes to learn more about the effects of space on a plant’s health this
way. “The patterns will tell us whether the plant defense system is operating
correctly or not,” he says.

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