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12 Jenny Mortimer: Plants in space
110 Plays5 months ago
Associate Professor Dr Jenny Mortimer discusses plants as a technology, and how she applies genetic engineering as a tool to solve wicked problems of sustainability in agricultural and pharmaceutical production. Her lab uses synthetic biology to develop new crops in controlled growth environments – including plants for space settlement as part of the newly formed ARC Centre of Excellence in Plants for Space.
BIO:
Jenny Mortimer is Associate Professor of Plant Synthetic Biology in the School of Agriculture, Food and Wine at the University of Adelaide. She is also an Affiliate Staff Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. After completing her PhD at Cambridge University, she began exploring how engineering the plant cell wall could deliver sustainable and economically viable biofuels. At Adelaide, her group is using synthetic biology to develop new crops for food and materials production in controlled growth environments – including for Space settlement, as part of the newly formed ARC Centre of Excellence Plants for Space (P4S). She is active in outreach and education, and collaborates with media, schools and museums. She is a handling editor for the prestigious journals Plant Cell Physiology and The Plant Journal.
Plant Kingdom is hosted and produced by Catherine Polcz with music by Carl Didur.
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Transcript
Introduction to Plant Kingdom Series
00:00:04
Speaker
I'm Katherine Poults and this is Plant Kingdom. I'm recording in beautiful Sydney on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, and I pay respect to their elders past, present, and future. Plant Kingdom is a conversation series about the sublime in plants, nature, and environment.
Guest Introduction: Dr. Jenny Mortimer
00:00:21
Speaker
We release two conversations each month and hear from people who have an intimacy with plants and nature. Today's conversation is with Dr.
Synthetic Biology in Space Settlement Crops
00:00:30
Speaker
Jenny Mortimer.
00:00:31
Speaker
She is an associate professor of plant synthetic biology in the School of Agriculture, Food and Wine at the University of Adelaide. Her lab uses synthetic biology to develop new crops in controlled growth environments, including plants for space settlement as part of the newly formed ARC Center for Plants in Space.
Plants as Technology and Genetic Engineering
00:00:52
Speaker
We spoke about plants as technology, genetic engineering as a tool to solve wicked problems, and the ever fascinating work and challenges of designing plants for so upcoming space missions. Here's our conversation.
00:01:08
Speaker
Thank you so much for chatting with me today. Jenny, space plants is such an interesting topic and also haven't had too many conversations about genetic engineering as part of this project.
Fascination and Role of Plants in Civilization
00:01:21
Speaker
So I'm really excited about that as well. The big picture of a lot of your work applies the tools of genetic engineering and biotechnology to solve many different wicked problems. Where did this start for you?
00:01:37
Speaker
Yeah, it's a great question. And so I've always been really fascinated by plants ever since I was a kid. I've sort of been amazed that you know a seed can land somewhere and then the plant has to grow where it landed and it has to respond, deal with the environment around around it. And so I've been curious to understand how plants do that. They don't have a brain, a central nervous system like animals. And then as I sort of thought more about plants, they're so critical to so many aspects of our life. I think we kind of take them for granted because they sort of sit there quietly.
00:02:07
Speaker
And I became more and more interested in how we as humans have made use of plants as our civilizations have kind of developed and lots of different ways, whether we're thinking about food or materials.
Legacy of Genetic Engineering for Human Benefit
00:02:19
Speaker
And then as we're facing the challenges around us now, you know, increasing population, the strain we've put on our planet, I've become really curious about how we can accelerate that process of making use of plants so that we can really maintain the quality of life that we we sort of take for granted, but in a way which has a maybe lighter touch on the planet.
00:02:38
Speaker
Yeah it's so interesting I think how people's entry into science too when you're just starting out or it's really a way to get close to nature and plants and to get to carve out a space where you can spend all day thinking about them and learning about them. There's not a lot of other options. like I guess how science has kind of evolved is that there's such distinctions when we think about biotechnology or lab work and ecology and agriculture, but it's much more fluid, isn't it? What you can learn from each each area and how
00:03:14
Speaker
we actually interact and engage with plants is much more nuanced and messy than any of those specific areas.
Synthetic Biology: Redesigning Biology for Humans
00:03:23
Speaker
Exactly. And and I'm the first say I'm not a botanist. I'm woeful when it comes to these things. But i'm but for me, it's really been that fascination of how do they work at kind of the sailor level, like what's going on with them? And, you know, they' they're able to take really fairly simple ingredients, so sunlight and carbon dioxide.
00:03:43
Speaker
some water and a few sort of nutrients and nitrogen and phosphate and a few other bits and pieces and they do this incredibly complex biochemistry to make these incredible different structures and Materials and I find that sort of whole process fascinating It's so amazing and we don't where it's so ubiquitous so every day we we benefit from the the alchemy of of plant chemistry. And just thinking about some of your other work, it's really interesting to come back to what plants have done on Earth in terms of making Earth livable for us. And yeah, we we live in their world, certainly. Yeah, and I wanted to ask you, so you mentioned this already, but of course, humans have used plants in countless ways since we've been around for building materials, for food, for tools, medicines, almost every everything we have, a lot of it's history.
00:04:43
Speaker
can be sourced to to plants. And do you kind of see the biotechnology and genetic engineering as kind of just a continuation of this legacy or do you think it is introducing something new? Yeah, I actually absolutely think of it as a continuation is that we have shaped plants for our own use sort of pretty much since humans evolved.
00:05:04
Speaker
So if you think about the crops that we grow, the foods we eat, none of them, really, that I can think of top of my head, and really look like the kind of original wild version. So if you look at so what the
Importance of Plant Cell Wall Structure
00:05:16
Speaker
original to tomato looked like or corn, so the corn arose in Mexico. It looks like a, it's ah called tia sinte, it's the ancestor.
00:05:24
Speaker
It's got a few small seed heads that looks kind of more like a very small weedy barley or something. Farmers and their expertise over the years has selected and selected and chosen to make that plant that looks like corn today. And then that process is kind of accelerated as different types of breeding techniques have gone from just farmers saving seed or choosing one that produced more seed or had a certain feature that we like, like the pods don't shatter and fall on the ground, they stay on the plant.
00:05:51
Speaker
And then over time it's accelerated to different types of breeding technologies and of being a bit more scientific about how we go about things. But it's that you long continuous journey of knowledge and expertise that's kind of led us here. And so I just see things like genetic engineering or synthetic biology and as tools. They're not kind of an end point. They're just a way in which we can perhaps be a bit more precise or do things that we can't do through conventional methods. People like to say, oh, you know,
00:06:20
Speaker
It's bad or good, but actually it's about how we use any tool or how we use any technology that that's what you have to really consider. Yeah, definitely. And I guess, can you can you talk about some of the methods that you do use in your research? um Yeah, sure. I'm a plant physiologist by training, so measuring how plants respond to the environment and understanding that at kind of a cellular level, how do they communicate and move things around. So we use everything from some molecular biology to understanding how the plant takes those signals in, how that changes gene expression, how that output is both in terms of, say, maybe the proteins, the products of those genes, but also how that that whole plant looks, so what we call the phenotype. So we have this genotype phenotype. and so
00:07:08
Speaker
I'm very interested particularly in the plant cell wall, which are the complex sugars around every plant cell. So what what gives a plant cell shape and function. But that plant cell wall is also mostly what we often use when we think of plant biomass. So if you take a piece of wood, that's basically all cell wall. Your cotton t-shirt is just a really specialized cell wall in terms of the cotton fiber. And so we use a lot of sort chemistry to try and understand the structures of those of the cell wall because it's actually composed of lots and lots of different types of molecules that come together to make this really incredible kind of nanomaterial that the plant requires to hold its cells together because the pressure inside a plant cell is somewhere akin to a plant tire. So if you don't have a cell wall, the cell will just burst. And so this this cell wall kind of sits beautifully around the outside of a plant cell and it has to
00:07:58
Speaker
When the plant's growing, the cells expand and it has to allow enough kind of stretch and expansion that the cell can grow a bit, but it can't go too fast. So there's this really kind of beautiful tension of of has to be this functional wall. And so I want to be able to use this cell wall to make materials and bioproducts and all sorts of things, but I still have to make sure that it's actually functional for the plant and we just don't get exploding cells everywhere.
Arabidopsis as a Model Organism
00:08:23
Speaker
You know, I have not spent too much time thinking about the plant cell wall in my life, but the structure and the molecules, is it is it really different between species than and the traits that we associate with plants and different families or different species? A lot of that can be attributed to the plant wall. Yeah, absolutely. Like even if you think about like a hardwood versus a softwood, they have very different structures and that's entirely driven by the the cell wall. So a lot of our dietary fiber, that's the cell wall as well.
00:08:53
Speaker
So some foods and grains that have different kind of dietary fiber properties, maybe, for example, oats have this kind of glue cannon that's been shown to be pretty good for us. That's a certain type of polysaccharide. So all of those different things have lots of impacts on how we use them and interact with them, but also how the plant can use it to shape its cells, even things like its water conducting cells. So plants, if you take a lot of plants and kind of cut them across the stem, you'll see these water conducting vessels that have very thick walls around them. The plant has developed these walls to have certain properties that they are really, really tough and resilient and can conduct this water long distances. Yeah, amazing. So even within one plant, there's a lot of different types of cell walls. And can you just can you just describe
00:09:39
Speaker
What's synthetic? Just a small question. Can you just define what synthetic biology is? Honestly, ah sometimes it depends who you ask, but really the idea is that it comes, a lot of it, it comes from biologists looking at engineers and going, wow, wouldn't it be amazing if we could sort of rewire biology to do what we would like it to do? So if we could have like engineers have a blueprint,
00:10:05
Speaker
They have set parts, which, you know, if you tell someone, you give them a list of parts, they can go to the bunnings and they can go and build exactly the same thing using your blueprint, probably, more or less. And in biology, we just can't do that, but what we'd like to do. And there's something in particular, this idea that you design a system in engineering, you build it, you test it, and then you learn from what you did, and then you kind of go back around that cycle again. This design, build, test, learn is really at the core of engineering.
00:10:31
Speaker
and trying to build good systems and so we've taken that to biology and said can we we think we know how we can change an output so make a plant grow glow green for example so we might take that protein that makes the plant go green we introduce it we say okay Does it make the plant glow green? Yes, but it's not very good, or it's not very bright, or it doesn't work under all conditions. Okay, maybe we can go back and put another copy of that gene in there, or maybe we can go and look and get that gene copy from somewhere else, or we can control how the plant expresses that protein. There's lots of different things we can do. So it's all about trying to redesign biology for our own ends. People do that a lot in microbes. Microbes are single cells. life Life's a lot easier if you're just working with single cells. Plants are multicellular organisms.
00:11:18
Speaker
yeah They have root cells and leaf cells. but Inside a root, there's lots of different cell types. So doing that synthetic biology is much, much harder. So it's much closer to doing, I would say, controlled genetic engineering. There's much more of a continuum, this idea of, can we introduce a few genes to make a certain compound? so And then once we've introduced it, can we make it better and better? We might get small amounts at first, but there are ways we can tweak and tune the system.
00:11:44
Speaker
And I guess a a lot of this kind of fundamental plant physiology research is done on different model organisms. Understanding these organisms gives us great insights into different aspects of genetics, biochemistry, all all kinds of questions. And you've done some work with the plant. I'm always so interested in Arabidopsis as a model organism. Can you talk a bit about your Arabidopsis work? And I guess if you have any insights into what we've learned about the world and about plants and about biology from this species. Yeah. um I think modern organisms are ah so important to us trying to understand biology. Biology is and incredibly complex, but there's a lot of
00:12:27
Speaker
similarities between and across systems which is why when we think say about medical research often than a lot about early work is done perhaps in mice or fruit flies or nematode worms because there are certain systems in there we can understand in a much simpler system before we kind of think about these more complex systems and in plant biology for a long time people worked on plants that weren't close to them that were easy to get or maybe you get large amounts of. So if you were a biochemist and you were in Japan you worked on daikon radish because you could go to the grocery store and you could buy large amounts of daikon radish and you could work on understanding its biochemistry. But there was a movement in the community a while ago to start thinking about is there one plant that we could all come together on and really as a global community of plant biologists
00:13:13
Speaker
try and sort of really nail out there on how this one plant works. And then we can go back to the you know all the other different plants and start to apply some of that knowledge. And so there was lots of different candidates for thinking about this. which What would it be? But Arabidopsis was selected. It's a brassica, so it's related to things like broccoli and and Brussels sprouts and cabbage. But it's really a weedy little plant.
00:13:35
Speaker
that grows all around the world. But it had lots of features that we loved about it, so it's quite short and that's quite good. If you're thinking about trying to grow lots of plants for experiments, you if you can put them on shelves under lights rather than having to grow a corn plant, which is a meter, meter and a half to tall, that's much, much easier when you've got limited space. It grows pretty fast. It goes from seed to seed in about 10 weeks.
00:13:57
Speaker
which means if you're thinking about planning your experiments, it goes really fast. It's got a relatively small genome. It only has two copies of its chromosomes, unlike some of the crops that we work on. We have lots of copies and they're very hard, like they're polybloid, very hard to work with. And so it it came up to out of all these kind of things. It came out of a really good solution. It's the plant we definitely know the most about compared to anything
Controlled Environments in Agriculture
00:14:19
Speaker
else. And we've been able to use genetic engineering tools. It's very easy to tinker with its DNA, to introduce foreign bits of DNA, so we can ask questions about how genes function and what happens if we make changes in a fairly controlled way.
00:14:34
Speaker
I remember this is probably not the most extraordinary thing, but just an example was they they made versions of Arabidopsis that could glow in the dark, things like that to try to understand, right? Yep. We do that all the time and I've never really got over the fun of using those proteins. So a lot of them come from bioluminescence of jellyfish and things like that. So we've taken the gene that encodes the protein in the jellyfish And we've put it into plants, and we can sort of attach it to other things we're interested in. So maybe there's another protein we're interested interested in. it And if you put this fluorescent green tag on it, you can follow where it's going in the cell. So is it moving around in the cell? Where is it functioning? Maybe it's only in the roots, or maybe it's only in the leaves.
00:15:13
Speaker
or maybe maybe it's only when the you stress the plant that it responds by producing this protein. So those glow-in-the-dark plants are incredibly useful. And now we have ones which are blue and pink and red. We have lots and lots of different colors. So they're also very pretty. That's incredible that even proteins from from animals, from jellyfish, can be expressed and and have that impact.
00:15:37
Speaker
And that's one of the cool things about biology, right, is that we, quite often we can take that genetic code is to some extent universal. And so you can take proteins from other systems and put them into, say, plants. You can see, and they won't always work, and we don't really always understand why or why not.
00:15:54
Speaker
But for example, I'm really interested in this idea of using plants as sort of little green photosynthetic factories for producing certain compounds and proteins. Well, that's kind of one of the questions is which ones are going to work and which ones are not and how can we go about being one predicting that, but also improving that. So sometimes it might work, but not very well. So if there is a protein from another organism that's thinking about antibodies or there's, I was watching a talk recently where people were producing some of the proteins from breast milk,
00:16:23
Speaker
how do you make sure that they are you know folding correctly, that they have the same function that they do in human breast milk as if you produce them in plants so that you could then you know add them to a formula, for example? Fascinating. And I guess over the evolution of your your research, you started becoming really interested in controlled environments and closed systems. Can you talk a bit about what that what that means and what the benefits of that, or not the benefits necessarily, but the opportunities of working in those systems are for a research. Yeah, absolutely. And so partly partly it's selfishness is that um'm I've been very interested for a long time in developing crops to to produce biofuels that we can replace fossil fuels. And so a lot of that work is doing work in the lab using genetic engineering to try and make plants which grow really well.
00:17:12
Speaker
but that their cell wall is easier to break apart in a biorefinery and make fuels out of. And so the final part of your testing, you do tons of work in the lab for years, is you do what's called a field trial, because really farmers are going to be growing them in fields, so you've got to see how they respond. Now the problem is that when we're thinking, we talked about that genotype phenotype earlier, that you have this interplay of the genes giving rise to an output, the phenotype. But actually, as we all know from the phrase kind of nature nurture,
00:17:39
Speaker
It's not just about your genes. It's also for the environment that you're raised in. And that's equally true of plants. So if you you know if you're out in the garden, and you take a packet of seeds. you know that if you have some in one end of a flower bed, they might grow a bit better than the other because they get a bit more water or perhaps a bit more sun. And so same as when we go to field trials that we will get, in the lab we have this very controlled environment and everything worked beautifully, but you go out in the field and you get lots and lots of different outputs back and it's very difficult to control. And that makes it really, really tough to get a really good solid product.
Growing Plants in Space: Nutrition and Psychology
00:18:09
Speaker
So, you know, plant breeders are amazing people in what they're able to deliver to growers.
00:18:14
Speaker
So I started thinking about, well, if I really want to make an impact rapidly, we don't really understand this interplay of genotype and environment very well. So maybe I just need to take a shortcut and start thinking about if we can fix that environment, I can design a plant for that environment. Even if it's not optimal, at least we'll get very reproducible plants and that really helps when thinking about bringing things to market or so thinking about new technologies are trying to bring to market and so that came down to this idea of closed environment agriculture and what we mean by that is that the plants um aren't growing outside and there's a whole kind of continuum of how you do that that could be just like under a poly tunnel like growing strawberries through to what we mostly do where you are
00:18:55
Speaker
ah in a kind of controlled room where you're providing temperature, humidity, and lights, so LED lights. And I would say 10 years ago, people in that, that's talked about as kind of vertical farming is kind of the more extreme end. People were talking about that from maybe Singapore or Tokyo, places where There's not a lot of land and people are trying to think about how you feed lots of people with very limited resources. But actually, over time, it's become pretty clear that this technology isn't just for the very land-limited places. it It actually has a place in Australia, for example, because it can do things like massively reduce your water usage because you're completely enclosed, so you can capture all your water and recycle it. It uncouples you of production of food or plants from seasons.
00:19:37
Speaker
And as someone in the Southern Hemisphere, often what you're doing is then once we get out of season of certain crops, we're importing them. So if you think about the carbon footprint kind of encapsulates in a lot of those foods, it's really a challenge. And also it's a problem when supply chains kind of fall apart. We think about COVID, so this idea that I could design a plant for this fixed environment and know that the chances are that ah the work from my team would be able to be, I could go to a grower and say, look, we've already tested at this environment and it looks like this. So when you scale up,
00:20:07
Speaker
chances are it's probably going to look about the same. I think that can be very powerful for accelerating some of these new technologies to market. As you were saying, it allows you to grow plants in many different environments. Which is what I want to ask you about, about next. How did plants for space, plants in space, space plants for research, how did that enter your your world?
00:20:28
Speaker
It's been really amazing to think about as humans start to think about returning to the surface of the moon and really exploring space a lot further. That's been, you know, people have been talking about returning to the moon for a long time, but in the last sort of five, 10 years, suddenly as commercial space has taken off, this idea of humans living and working in space and further from the surface of the earth has really become a reality. And, you know, I go into i'll go into schools and talk about plants and space, and I'm talking to kids who, by the time they graduate college,
00:20:57
Speaker
You know, the the plan is that people be living on the on the surface of the moon. There'll be kind of permanent habitation there. And I think that's sort of mind-blowing in some ways. But what became has become pretty clear is that we can humanity can make big rockets. We can actually travel the distances, say, to go to Mars, for example. But what we can't do is really ensure that humans that go on those missions are healthy and that they can thrive in these these conditions. And one particular kind of Big barrier is food. So the calculations are if you had a team of four people going to Mars, it's a nine month trip. There, you're probably there for a year and come back.
00:21:32
Speaker
So let's call it a three-year round trip. It's something like 10 tons of food is what you'd need to take with you. And you simply can't take that. But also, it's not just about the calories and the volume of food. It's also about the quality and the nutrition and the flavor and the texture. And is anyone if you've ever done like a long camping trip and been stuck on kind of those kind of rehydrated foods for a long time, for the first couple of days, you know everyone loves astronaut ice cream or freeze-dried raspberries or whatever, the novelty wears off pretty quickly.
00:22:01
Speaker
And you start to miss all those things that come with having fresh vegetables and and salads. Like if you've ever been there, the first thing, where you want to have a green salad if you've eaten a lot of kind of processed food. A lot of us get that craving for for crunch and texture.
Therapeutic Benefits of Plants in Isolation
00:22:15
Speaker
um And astronauts really miss that when they're up on the International Space Station. They all complain about, they've got these perfectly nutritionally designed meals, but they are all kind of microwave, heat up, hot water adding meals.
00:22:28
Speaker
and they miss crunch in texture. So, about 1970s, NASA started growing some plants in space, initially just on the ISS, just actually before that on MIR and also and in shuttle experiments as well, to really just first to understand how plant can you grow a plant in microgravity? You know, plants evolved in 1G here on Earth. They never experienced microgravity. They have no reason to have to think about microgravity. well How will they even grow?
00:22:55
Speaker
And it turns out they grow pretty fine. You have to tell them that put a light above them so they know which way to send the leaf. You know, water below them so they know which way to send the root. Otherwise, they're surprisingly good at coping and in microgravity. But how do you go from growing a couple of plants to actually providing food in a robust and reliable way? Because if people are traveling far from Earth, they're going to be relying on this for their welfare, their health, their survival. So the questions we're asking kind of as part of this plants of space program is,
00:23:24
Speaker
Can we develop really robust, reliable plant growth systems which can produce the food we need in this kind of controlled environment? Because it's essentially the same thing as what I was talking about. We're going to be providing everything the plants need. So we're going to be providing light, we're going to be providing atmosphere, temperature, humidity. So it's actually very, very similar systems. and While on in transit or on the ISS, I mean microgravity, on the surface of the moon or on Mars, it's really going to be essentially ah a controlled environment room you're going to be growing in. So I don't know if you've seen the Martian or read the Martian. Bostonist here, Rowan. Not a lot of them.
00:24:00
Speaker
In popular culture. Not a lot of them, but he he was growing potatoes kind of in the re the the Martian regolith, adding some human waste to go along with it. The regolith is actually pretty nasty, the surface of the planet. So what we're more likely to do is grow systems that look very much like vertical farming here on Earth. So using nutrient solutions, hydroponics, aeroponics. So there is this direct kind of relationship between how we might envision supporting human exploration.
00:24:28
Speaker
makes me think of a few ah few things. I think so often when we think about space too, we think about it as so so other. There's some boundary line where it just becomes science fiction and it's easy to also forget that Earth is in space and that we already are in space. And the conditions that plants can survive on this planet alone are so variable and so extreme too. It's really... interesting to think of it as a continuum of that a bit too. And yeah, thinking about the the astronauts missing crunchy food, it made me think of just traveling through Eastern Europe on a budget, meetinging needing some lettuce and salads in my life.
00:25:10
Speaker
And it's not just even that, it's also the the interaction with plants, like the smell and having them around you. So most of us have plants in our offices, at home, and the the astronauts talk, there' ah there's two growth facilities on the ISS at the moment.
Interdisciplinary Plant Research for Space
00:25:24
Speaker
One of them is like a very closed control system, but one is a much more open one where the astronauts can kind of open up and access the plants.
00:25:31
Speaker
and they all talk about the smell that comes from smelling plants when you're in a very, the ISS is either it doesn't smell of anything because the HVAC is working really well to keep everything really clean or it kind of can smell a bit funky if it's not working so well but it's very metallic, it's very artificial and it's it's sort of loud and clunky and sort of looking at the plants and smelling them brings people back to earth, it gives that connection back to home and it gives great joy and pleasure to have that connection. A lot of the astronauts talk about how valuable that is to their some mental health and how much it's important that they're able to to interact with the plants as a living thing that they can take care of. It's it's amazing. I was speaking to someone a few weeks ago who researches in therapeutic horticulture.
00:26:15
Speaker
which is, you know, it's it's similar to think about art therapy, but just the therapeutic qualities of gardening, which the benefits were just manifold. It's like having agency over growing your food. It was the social connection for a lot of people as well and the nature connection. And it's interesting to think about how that can translate into some of these really isolated environments as well. And you you told me before about an analog mission in Antarctica where they had a greenhouse. What was what was going on there?
00:26:47
Speaker
Yeah, so that's um a European Space Agency funded project called ah Eden. So one of the things we're trying to do is test these systems as much as possible before people rely on them in space. And overwintering in the Antarctic has a lot of similarities to being in space. know You've got this crew dropped off, they've got a a habitat that's beautifully well engineered, but then you're stuck with nine people who you're going to have to get on with really well, and you're meant to have everything you need with you. People are really not going to come and help you. It's going to be very, very hard for anyone to come and do anything or do any sort of intervention. And so this ISS was set up in ISS next to the German Neumeier station.
00:27:30
Speaker
in 2017 2018 and it ran for four years to the idea of producing fresh produce for these overwintering teams. So they had lettuce and strawberry and kohlrabi and pepper and cucumber and they got 270 kilos of fresh food that first kind of year round.
00:27:47
Speaker
and they all talked about the excitement of both having that as a supplement to all the kind of prepared processed foods that they had, but also the joy of like going across on your own away from all the other humans you were stuck with and standing in this light warm room that smelled of plants and then doing gardening to take care of it and that therapeutic thing. Getting a break because it's pretty hard psychologically to be stuck with a small team of people and then it gave them that kind of that break and what they needed to kind of get through the year so it's very very successful and so I think
00:28:20
Speaker
Yes, I think it ran for four years, then NASA took it over to run for one more year, and then it's currently in hibernation, but I suspect it'll get resurrected soon. I mean, I remember walking into greenhouses in Canadian winter and just the warmth and comfort that you feel there, which is, you know, we weren't thousands of kilometers away from.
00:28:38
Speaker
our family then, but it's it's very powerful. And collaborations with psychologists are also, I guess, you do you want to tell me a bit about the Plants for Space ARC project and then also and just a bit about how interdisciplinary that is and how you psychologists are becoming involved in that research as well?
00:28:58
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So we're very fortunate that um we have been funded by the Australian Research Council, so the Federal Government, a seven-year program called plants Plants for Space. We are headquartered at the University of Adelaide and we're going to be running for seven years. but We have five university partners across Australia, so University of Western Australia,
00:29:18
Speaker
the Trobe, Uni Melbourne, Flinders and Adelaide. But we also have lots of industry and government partners, as well as university partners overseas. Because as I said, it really is a team effort. And it's a global question. There's a lot of lot of interest in this. And although with a lot of us plant biologists, not everyone on the project is at all by any means. And really that that idea of what would we need for plants to support human habitation. And that means food, but also materials and and pharmaceuticals.
00:29:46
Speaker
but also it's not just about growing the plant, it's about processing them afterwards. So we have chemical engineers who think about, okay, if you've got, maybe you've produced a medicine in a plant on demand so because you can't take all the medicines with you, they don't necessarily have the shelf life. Okay, so how would you actually get that medicine out in a way that you could do in a pretty small scale with very limited sort of resources? But we also have people who are thinking about the psychology of being that far from Earth, but also about eating these new foods, not being able to eat everything you want. How do people respond to those new foods? But also medically, how does your gut respond to if we make different types of foods? Does your microbiome change? What does that mean? And then we also have an illegal expert. She's a professor of space law, because I think there's a concept a lot in that picking the popular media that space is kind of like the Wild West. You can do whatever you like. There's no rules.
00:30:38
Speaker
and that there's certain sudden personalities in the in the commercial space, kind of like to continue that line of thought. But actually there is lots of regulation and there's lots of global cooperation around space and people have signed up to things like the Artemis Accord, which talks about how we are going to go about exploring further into space and what can we agree on is the way we're all going to approach this.
00:30:59
Speaker
And of course, not everything has been thought about yet. So one thing we can do as a centre when we're starting to think through some of these issues is, okay, can we get people to start at least asking questions and thinking about what does it mean if we're taking plants with us to a different planet? Does it mean, does it make any difference if we're taking, say, genetically modified plants with us? What sort of containments are we looking at? what There's all sorts of questions we can
Growth Chamber Development for Artemis Mission
00:31:22
Speaker
ask. And I think It's much better to have those discussions openly and engage lots of different people's perspectives and then use that to you know advise on policy or at least give policymakers information that they need, rather than just saying, we're just going to do about it, go and do whatever and then worry about the consequences later. I think it's i think it's our job, particularly as academics, to start and think, OK, actually, hang on, what should we be doing and what things we need to put in place to make sure that we're doing it in the right way?
00:31:50
Speaker
And there are some very, very real and approaching projects that you are also involved in. Of course, one of them is the new Artemis missions that i I believe, starting from 2025, they're to send the first manned missions back to the moon. They'll put the first woman and first person of color on the moon, maybe the first plant on the moon.
00:32:17
Speaker
It doesn't make it into the headlines all the time. Can you talk tell me a bit about that research yet? Yeah, we're very lucky that we have been approved to develop a payload for Artemis 3. So I think it's now been pushed to 2026 for launch. so This is led by a company called Space Lab Technologies, who are a little space engineering company in Colorado in the US. And what we're going to do is we're developing a payload, which will have a little miniature growth chamber, which the astronauts will take out of the the landing unit. They will put it on the surface of the moon and basically press go. And this will cause our seeds to germinate in this little controlled chamber. The plants will grow for a few, days up to a week. we' We're still not sure exactly how long because it will depend on the mission and how it goes. And then samples will be returned after being what we call fixed. So the astronauts are going to press another button. This will release this chemical fixative that will basically freeze the plants as they are.
00:33:13
Speaker
and then we'll bring them back to Earth. And that means that what we'll be able to do is look at the molecular level and at the biochemical level, what the impact is of germinating and growing on the lunar surface. And because even though we're giving them this really, the engineers designed this really beautiful protective chamber, we know things like the radiation, the kind of the unusual gravity, we don't know really how that's going to affect the plants at all. And so this will be the first time that plants will be brought back from the moon to to analyze. so We can actually see what's happening. We'll also have cameras so we can visualize what's them growing as well at the same time and a few lots of other sensors but that sample return is the really what I'm super excited about.
00:33:51
Speaker
That's so exciting. And what, what species are, are getting sent? Excellent question. So we're bringing um our old friend Arabidopsis is going to go. Yay. Spacecress. Yes, because that's, we talk a lot about flight heritage of, there are some plants that already had a lot of flight time in microgravity. So we wanted to take things which had some experience because it helps us to, we already have a bit of data, how they respond to,
00:34:17
Speaker
you know, the process ah of being loaded on a rocket fired up into microgravity and and so living on the space station. So we use a RAVIDOPSIS. We're using a plant called brass garapa. Again, brass garapa is related to some broccolis and mizuna lettuce and that sort of thing. The benefit is they grow really, really, really fast. And so even if the mission's pretty short, we should get some decent sized seedlings from these brass garapa. And then the third plant is my absolute favorite, which is duck duckweed. And so duckweeds are, so this is actually going to be wolfy at Australia, aren't it? So it's going to be an Australian duckweed species. These are amazing fast-growing plants. I'm a big fan of them as a potential space food because
00:34:55
Speaker
You can actually eat the whole plant. It's really high in in protein. It's got all your amino acids, central amino acids. It's also full of vitamins. But it's other features. it It divides vegetatively, unlike most plants which do that seed to seed process. They and germinate, grow, and then flower and set seed. Duckweeds really hate to flower and set seed. They will do if you're really mean to them.
00:35:16
Speaker
But mostly they divide vegetatively, so they just kind of split in half and produce um what's called daughter fronds or granddaughter fronds. And they do this really, really fast. So it takes about one and a half to two days. So what we should be able to see on from those lunar samples is that we should see at least one, if not two generations of growth during that time they're on the on the surface of the moon.
00:35:40
Speaker
So incredible. And the duckweed research, is that a fairly new way that people are looking at duckweed and thinking about the potential of duckweed to produce different kinds of chemicals? Is it being considered to produce medicines or is it kind of about the different vitamins? What's what's kind of the scope of duckweeds in space? Yeah, people have known for a long time that they are edible and pretty high nutrition. And so like the World Health Organization has recommended them for a long time. They're eaten in parts of sort of Laos and North Thailand. The problem is when you grow them outside, they grow on the bodies of water they grow on. They'll take up, also they're really like kind of garbage scales. They're good at taking up lots of heavy metals. They are really good at cleaning water. That can often mean that's incorporated into them.
00:36:27
Speaker
which means them they can have problems when you eat them as food. The nice thing about using a vertical farming situation is that you're controlling everything, including your water, which means if you give them nice, clean water, then you get very high quality product that you can produce, and it's it's great to eat. The reason it's great for a vertical farm, they are tiny. They're like, I don't know, a couple of millimeters long. They're very flat profile. ah They're this the smallest the smallest flowering plants, is that right?
00:36:54
Speaker
They are the smallest flowering plant on the planet, so they are terribly cute. And if you look in a pond or a river near you, at some point you'll probably see some. So if your river near you goes green suddenly in the summer, people often think it's an algal bloom, sometimes it is, but have a bit of a closer look. Algae are tiny and kind of in the water column. Duckweeds are, because they're a couple of millimeters, you can see them with a naked eye and they're on the surface of the water.
00:37:17
Speaker
And so you can go go hunting for them. they are yeah so they're I think they're fascinating. So people have been interested in this food for a long time. but I love the idea of harnessing there. ability to rapidly grow, to take in, to do photosynthesis so fast, to use them as like little production factories for things like pharmaceuticals and materials.
Plants as Resources for Mars Missions
00:37:36
Speaker
um In much the same way that we've used yeast for a long time for for producing lots of compounds, and as synthetic biology develops, yeast is and other microbes have really been a backbone for that type of production of compounds. But those microbes need carbon, often in the form of sugar. That sugar comes
00:37:54
Speaker
from plants by way of photosynthesis. So I kind of see it as taking out the middle man, middle plant, is that if you do everything in your plant system, you've got this green photosynthetic factory for making things. And in a format which I think will grow really, really well in a vertical farming. Yeah, all it needs is sunlight or LED light in water, right? Yeah.
00:38:16
Speaker
Another project I wanted to ask you about is very exciting to be working with Axiom on the new, what will replace the International Space Station. Can you tell us a bit about what Axiom is is doing and what your involvement is? So Axiom are building the new commercial space station that will replace the International Space Station.
00:38:40
Speaker
And the way they're building it is they're building it in modules and the first modules will go up and be sort of clipped on to the end of the International Space Station. And then so this will gradually make it a self-sustaining station in its own right. And then the ISS will be decommissioned in 2030. And so the idea is then that there'll be commercial space stations in low Earth orbit with more of the sort of government funded stuff going on to exploring the moon and and beyond. And one thing that Axiom is very keen on is thinking about how they can support
00:39:12
Speaker
what essentially might be a workforce or of tourists or engineers, people who are going to be living in space who aren't necessarily going to be Air Force pilots. They're going to be people who maybe have lots of different requirements, who perhaps don't have quite the level of fitness, perhaps, as others, who want a more varied diet. And they've been wondering how they can start to produce food for this new these new clients. And so we've been very lucky. We got funding from the UK Space Agency and from the Australian Space Agency.
00:39:41
Speaker
with Axiom with some Australian companies like Sabre Aeronautics who run Mission Control here and a vertical farming company based in the UK called Vertical Futures. They were all partners on Planterspace and we are designing the the growth facility that will grow food on Axiom station and one of our big goals is How can we make it more autonomous? So we all, I don't know if you grow vegetables in your garden much, but one thing I think all of us learn when we first start growing our own food is how much work it takes. Like it's it's fine to get a few tomatoes. if You're really trying to get enough to replace for your grocery shopping.
00:40:14
Speaker
It's a full-time job. Farming is hard, surprise. But I think we forget we forget that sometimes. And so astronaut time, very, very restricted. And so you want to have some component where humans can interact with the plants. You probably don't want like a full-time Matt Damon botanist gardener. You actually, that's probably not going to happen. So you need what we call as close to an autonomous system as possible. And what that means is there's some way that the plant's growth and health is being monitored.
00:40:41
Speaker
And there's feedback computationally through the system that can adjust the growth conditions much the way a farmer would do. And I guess so many of these missions, you know you you mentioned sciences, teamwork, you learn from the work that's been done ahead of you. We've talked about the ISS, Axiom, Artemis, and these can be considered learnings and missions on the way to Mars, of course. I guess what what's your kind of feeling about Mars and is plants on Mars ah in in our future?
00:41:14
Speaker
I really do actually and it's just something that I'm surprised to think about but I think we we have now a really clear path of how to get there and one of the things about returning to the surface of the Moon is really as part of preparing for going beyond that to going to Mars. I think we're going to use the Moon as a really amazing learning facility that's then going to allow us to go on.
00:41:36
Speaker
But I think the food problem what is very difficult to solve if you're not going to be growing some plants, because the further you go away from Earth, the more you can't really predict what you need. There's more unexpected things happening. So you're going to need to be able to provide fresh food, but I actually think it's things like the on-demand production of medicines, like using plants for that production, using plants to produce materials. If you can take a handful of seeds,
00:41:58
Speaker
and a handful of nutrients. And then you can use that to make building materials or to make medications. That's really, really powerful. And that harnessing biology, which is actually really what you know we talked at the beginning, what humans have done throughout history, it's just in a fairly defined way.
Space Research and Earth's Sustainability
00:42:15
Speaker
Because if you've got a team of people going out to Mars, who knows what they're going to experience in terms of health issues? It's a very long trip.
00:42:24
Speaker
you simply just can't take everything with you. So you want to have a system which really responds to needs and I think that's that's really what we can do here. I don't think we have the ability to do that yet but that's really where the centre comes in that we've we've got is that we think we can sort of take the steps in that journey to to get us there. It's so exciting.
00:42:44
Speaker
This is another thing that you kind of touched upon already, you know, so many technologies that we use every day. There is this two-way benefits of research, space research often benefits us on Earth too, right? Like LEDs we were just talking about, um there's been blood plasma research, all kinds of ah research. And do you see, I guess, applications of this space plant research on Earth?
00:43:13
Speaker
I do. Absolutely. And honestly, I think it's the benefits are way more on Earth, to be honest. I think the balance, I think it's easy to have the headline and we um mean we are called plants to space, right? But actually, you know our big impact is going to be here on Earth. And I know people have a concern of that Why are we funding kind of research in space? We've got so many problems here on earth We should be trying to resolve those but I do think there's something magical ah about space and how it inspires really creative thinking and problem solving because it puts puts your mind in a situation where you have to solve the problem and
00:43:45
Speaker
because you have to if you're going to succeed. And there's no, oh, I can't do that because it's going to be too expensive, or I can't do that because you've got some parameters and you've got to think within them and you've got to come up with a solution. And I think NASA have used that as a really powerful way. And you talked about a few things, everything from your iPhone camera to insulin pumps, to the LASIK eye surgery, to yeah the LED lights. NASA's really generated a lot of these technologies. I think we can do the same when we're thinking about plant synthetic biology and sort of using plants as so production platforms. So we see it just as a way of really inspiring and interesting people and getting us all really interested about solving these problems because it's the ultimate in sustainability and circularity. There's no extra nitrogen from somewhere, there's no extra water from somewhere, there's no extra carbon. You've got to make use of what you've got there and you've got to be really creative, like every waste stream you want to make sure you use it and recycle it and that's a lesson we can really bring back here on earth I think very powerfully. So yes, I see it more that I think closed environment agriculture, vertical farming,
00:44:44
Speaker
Using plants and production systems for more than just food is it's a growing area and I think this can just be an aspect of what we
Challenges and Evolution in Plant Research
00:44:51
Speaker
do. We'll really inform that and push that forward. That's my hope. So something that you you mentioned to me in our first conversation, which I thought about was really interesting was, I guess in this in this field, you get to collaborate with scientists, researchers from a lot of different disciplines. And you spoke a bit before about observing kind of the rise and fall of some of these vertical vertical farming startups and and just maybe how surprising the complexities of biological systems
00:45:25
Speaker
were and are to, well, when when working with them, you can't control all of the outputs. And I guess in your work, is that something that the the mysteries of these systems, is that something that really keeps you interested, that there's always gonna be so many challenges, there's so much we don't know, so much we can't control? What's what's your relationship?
00:45:53
Speaker
Yeah, I think one of the, most so slightly terrifying things about being a scientist or asking these questions, that there's no end point, right? There's always so many things. And anytime, I've always i've learned this very quickly, anytime you think you've, oh I've definitely solved that problem, I know everything there is to know about that, something else crops up, which kind of challenges your assumption. So you're constantly kind of reshaping your view on how they grow and what they can do. And so um I think i'm never I'm never going to run out of things to to question. and I find that really, really amazing. and that you know that i've For example, this environment fixing, like using a controlled environment to try and at least unpick some of those questions and just try and make like my life easier, has led me down this whole path of the ending up putting, hopefully, plants on the surface of the moon. so I love that you never know where it's going to take you, these questions, in really, really unexpected directions. and It's an amazing tool for inspiration. so
00:46:48
Speaker
I do a lot of work going into schools and talking to the general public about plants and sustainability and how key they are to what we do. and But I found that the space stuff kind of really excites a different group of people in a different way but it comes back to that same thing and trying to explain those questions about how amazing plants are, how much they're still to understand and that it's a really fun system to work on that I think touches pretty much every aspect of our life.
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
00:47:27
Speaker
That was my conversation with Dr. Jenny Mortimer. Thank you for listening and thank you to Jenny for sharing her work. Plant Kingdom is hosted and produced by me, Catherine Poults. Our music is by Carl Dider. Listen to us wherever you get your podcasts and check out our website at plantkingdom dot.earth. If you have been enjoying our show, please consider checking us a review on Apple Podcasts. It it really helps. Thanks so much.