Rocket seedling production on the international space station: Growth and nutritional properties

Rocket Science: The Effect of Spaceflight on Germination Physiology, Ageing, and Transcriptome of Eruca sativa Seeds

“…Molecular analysis of growing seedlings and adult plants in microgravity by epigenomics [10], transcriptomics, and proteomics [8,9,11] identified known and novel genes specific for the response to the space environment. This research has potential to be applied to growing fresh food derived from plants for nutrition and human survival in space during long-distance space travel [5,7,[12][13][14][15][16][17]. These works demonstrated that successful 'seed-to-seed' plant cultivation and propagation is possible but also that space-produced seeds may differ in reserve composition and properties.…”

Agro-biology for bioregenerative Life Support Systems in long-term Space missions: General constraints and the Italian efforts

“…However, similar values of dry weight and dry matter (percentage) were noticed in seedlings grown in the presence and absence of clinorotation, while these were significantly lower and higher, respectively, under real microgravity conditions. As far as the intrinsic quality of rocket seedlings was concerned, comparable results were assessed in seedlings grown in the presence and absence of clinorotation for chlorophyll, total carbohydrates, triglycerides, carotenoids and vitamin C (Rivera et al 2006), while decreasing values of chlorophyll, triglycerides, carotenoids were noticed in seedlings grown under real microgravity conditions (Colla et al 2007a). Moreover, the rocket seedlings grown in Space showed typical characteristics of seedling grown under sub-optimal light conditions (closed cotyledons, elongation of hypocotyls, low content of chlorophyll and total carotenoids) highlighting the important issue of adequate light supply and optimization of growing conditions to increase seedling quality.…”

“…Most of these Italian studies have focused on the possibility to produce sprouts in Space as easy 'vegetal systems' that can be produced in a few days, in small volume, with low energy, to integrate into crew diet (De Micco et al 2006a,d;Colla et al 2007a;De Micco and Aronne 2008a,b). Sprouts would not be candidate vegetal systems in bioregenerative support systems, because of many negative issues related to their production, such as oxygen consumption until the expansion of true leaves; however, from a nutritional viewpoint, they are desirable being a significant source of proteins, vitamins, minerals, phenolics and other important compounds for human nutritional needs.…”

“…sprouts under simulated microgravity conditions (ASI project 'Morphological and Physiological response of seedlings to a low-gravity environment') set by clinorotation (Rivera et al 2006) or under real microgravity during the ENEIDE mission (SEEDLINGS project) on the International Space Station (ISS) (Colla et al 2007a). Microgravity affected rocket germination, but no morphological anomalies were noticed except some degree of negative geotropism in a small number of roots on Earth-grown and Space-grown seedlings (Rivera et al 2006) and thinner seedlings with closed cotyledons in Space-grown seedlings (Colla et al 2007a). Moreover, triglycerides content in seedlings fell during germination while free glycerol content increased, but changes were less pronounced in seedlings grown under simulated microgravity, indicating that simulated microgravity decreased the speed at which triglycerides were used during germination and seedling growth ( Figure 1).…”

The Effects of Clinorotation on the Host Plant, Medicago truncatula, and Its Microbial Symbionts

“…Research to date suggests that plants can survive and produce a viable food source on the ISS; however, these plants may be stressed growing in microgravity conditions and may not be reaching their full potential as a food source (Colla et al, 2007;Wolverton and Kiss, 2009;Vandenbrink and Kiss, 2016). On Earth, plants have microbial symbionts that are beneficial under stressful conditions such as increased salinity, drought, and heavy metal toxicity (Nadeem et al, 2014).…”