This fungus may be the key to growing food on other planets, during drought
NEW MEXICO (KRQE) – A key component to the puzzle of deep space exploration and colonization is food. Learning how to grow vegetation in space will help keep astronauts healthy, but there are some earth-bound applications to that research as well.
KRQE News 13’s Chad Brummett met with one University of New Mexico (UNM) scientist who is working on a difficult feat. David Hanson, the assistant vice president for research at UNM, is figuring out how to grow agricultural products, like tomatoes, in the face of harsh environmental conditions.
Hanson is working with a group of scientists on a mission taking place 250 miles beyond planet Earth; it is called the Trichoderma Associated Space Tomato Inoculation Experiment, or TASTIE for short. Their goal is to determine if a prevalent genus of fungi, Trichoderma, could be the key to growing produce under arid conditions.
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“When it’s growing with tomatoes, they grow better. And we don’t know for sure how they grow better. And what becomes really interesting is growing in space and that extreme environment … is still pretty stressful for plants,” says Hanson.
In January, the group sent cold-storage samples of tomato seeds, along with the Trichoderma, to the International Space Station (ISS) for testing. Growing vegetation on the Space Station is not new; the vegetable production system, known as Veggie, was launched in 2014. However, in recent years, the ISS has adopted the advanced plant technology first used by Hanson in one of his previous experiments.
Researchers are not only looking to see how the samples respond to the harsh environment of space, but they are also looking at how much water is consumed with the help of the Trichoderma. The naturally occurring fungus is sown with the tomato seeds and has been shown to help plants grow on Earth.
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“We don’t know a lot about how that interaction works,” says Hanson. “And so this is one way of testing what kinds of things might disrupt that.”
The goal of the research is to not only provide b better nutrition to astronauts but also to better understand how to potentially combat the effects of climate change here on Earth. Hanson says the samples returned to Earth in February, but it will take about a year before his team’s findings are ready for publication.
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