A reported breakthrough in agricultural biotechnology is poised to head aboard the International Space Station. Scientists at the University of California, Riverside, have developed a genetically engineered tomato plant that grows to only a few inches in height, the university said in a news release.
The tomato plant is now undergoing observations at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., and its seeds are in line for a payload flight within the next year or so, the release said.
Its voyage will be a generational first, according to the university, as the seeds will germinate in the station’s Advanced Plant Habitat laboratory and produce fruit, and the seeds of that fruit will be planted again to create a second generation of tomatoes grown in space.
“So, it’s going to be a seed-to-a-seed-to-a-seed, which has never been done before in space,” Robert Jinkerson said in a UCR Magazine article, “Food in the Final Frontier.” Jinkerson is an associate professor of chemical and environmental engineering in UC Riverside’s Marlan and Rosemary Bourns College of Engineering.
Yet tomatoes may not be the only fresh produce harvested at the space station, the release said. A team led by Jinkerson is also developing a mushroom that can be grown on spaceships. In fact, NASA this month awarded the team $250,000 for a compact system that produces enough mushrooms in the space of a small closet to provide astronauts about 4,000 calories a day, according to the university.
“With our system, we estimate we can get about 4,000 calories per day,” Jinkerson said in the UCR Magazine article. “It’s a lot more than you could do with biological photosynthesis.”
