Abstract
Plants are a necessary component of any system of bioregenerative life-support for human space exploration. For this purpose, plants must be capable of surviving and adapting to gravity levels different from the Earth gravity, namely microgravity, as it exists on board of spacecrafts orbiting the Earth, and partial-g,as it exists on the surface of the Moon or Mars. Gravity is a fundamental environmental factor for driving plant growth and development through gravitropism. Exposure to real or simulated microgravity produces a stress response in plants, which show cellular alterations and gene expression reprogramming. Partial-gstudies have been performed in the ISS using centrifuges and in ground based facilities, by implementing adaptations in them. Seedlings and cell cultures were used in these studies. The Mars gravity level is capable of stimulating the gravitropic response of the roots and preserving the auxin polar transport. Furthermore, whereas Moon gravity produces alterations comparable, or even stronger than microgravity, the intensity of the alterations found at Mars gravity was milder. An adaptive response has been found in these experiments, showing upregulation of WRKY transcription factors involved in acclimation. This knowledge must be improved by incorporating plants to the coming projects of Moon exploration.
Highlights
The achievement of plant cultivation in space, called “space farming” is an important step in the development of bioregenerative life-support systems (BLSS) to enable long-term human space exploration
Similar plant growth experiments on Earth, using ground based facilities for microgravity simulation, such as clinostats and random positioning machines have been successfully run (Kiss et al, 2019). They have provided a reliable replica of the biological results obtained in space experiments under real microgravity, even though the gravity vector is not possible to be avoided or removed on the Earth surface (Herranz et al, 2013; Medina et al, 2015; Van Loon, 2016)
Physiological and cellular alterations are related to changes in gene expression, which have been identified by transcriptomic studies from space and ground experiments (Paul et al, 2012; Kwon et al, 2015; Johnson et al, 2017; Paul et al, 2017; Choi et al, 2019; Herranz et al, 2019; Kamal et al, 2019; Vandenbrink et al, 2019; Kruse et al, 2020; Villacampa et al, 2021a)
Summary
The achievement of plant cultivation in space, called “space farming” is an important step in the development of bioregenerative life-support systems (BLSS) to enable long-term human space exploration. Similar plant growth experiments on Earth, using ground based facilities for microgravity simulation, such as clinostats and random positioning machines have been successfully run (Kiss et al, 2019).
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