Agricultural Technology

Astronauts might soon grow SPACE tomatoes developed at UCR’s Plant Transformation Research center

NASA grant to UC Riverside to help put tiny tomato plants on the International Space Station

Tiny tomato plants developed at the University of California, Riverside (UCR), could one day feed astronauts on the International Space Station. The plants have minimal leaves and stems but still produce a normal amount of fruit, making them a potentially productive crop for cultivation anywhere with limited soil and natural resources.

Now, with a grant from the NASA-funded Translational Research Institute for Space Health, UCR researchers will tweak the tomatoes to make them also uniquely suited to growing in space. Dubbed Small Plants for Space Expeditions, or SPACE, plants by the researchers, the technology could be applied to other plants to develop a suite of crops for agriculture on the International Space Station and future space colonies.

Something as simple as tomatoes, genetically engineered, aren’t the only thing coming out of the Riverside Agricultural powerhouse; the university’s Plant Transformation Research Center (PTRC) is home to several projects, those included from other universities.

Tiny tomato plants developed at the University of California, Riverside (UCR), could one day feed astronauts on the International Space Station. The plants have minimal leaves and stems but still produce a normal amount of fruit, making them a potentially productive crop for cultivation anywhere with limited soil and natural resources.

Agricultural Innovation within Riverside County, at the UCR research center. 

Now, with a grant from the NASA-funded Translational Research Institute for Space Health, UCR researchers will tweak the tomatoes to make them also uniquely suited to growing in space. Dubbed Small Plants for Space Expeditions, or SPACE, plants by the researchers, the technology could be applied to other plants to develop a suite of crops for agriculture on the International Space Station and future space colonies.

Something as simple as tomatoes, genetically engineered, aren’t the only thing coming out of the Riverside Agricultural powerhouse; the university’s Plant Transformation Research Center (PTRC) is home to several projects, those included from other universities.

From Agrobacterium Protocols using potatoes to in vitro Propagation of Macadamia, the PTRC lab is discovering new ways that plants can survive and thrive in an evolving impacts of climate change to provide sustainable solutions for 9 billion people on earth by the year 2050.

The College of Natural & Agricultural Sciences (CNAS) is home to world-renowned scholars pursuing research that deepens our knowledge of the universe we live in and improves the quality of life for inhabitants of the state, the nation, and the world. Central to this research is educating the students who come to CNAS to learn about science and who leave with an integrated approach to how they can change the world. These students, and the faculty who teach them, benefit from a structure that is unique among land-grant colleges: CNAS’s 13 departments encompass the life, physical, mathematical, and agricultural sciences.

CARBON CAPTURE AND THE  ALUMINUM RESISTANCE IN PLANTS: Principal Investigator, Paul Larsen, developed a prototype crop and validated the technology. One project objective was to modify maize to be tolerant to aluminum toxicity in soils.

In addition, through this tolerance mode of action, enhanced levels of plant-based carbon are added to the soil which could significantly contribute to the effort to capture and sequester atmospheric CO2 and reduce the rate of global warming.

After wildfires, do microbes exhale potent greenhouse gas?: A research team led by UC Riverside mycologist Sydney Glassman will spend the next three years answering this question, examining how bacteria, viruses, fungi and archaea work together in post-fire soils to affect nitrous oxide emissions.

Their work is supported by a new $3.1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy. “Nitrogen in the form of nitrous oxide, and the microbes that regulate it, are a less well-studied aspect of the problem, but an aspect we must solve to more fully understand how the planet is changing, and how much we can expect it to keep changing,” she said.

The fires themselves send warming gases into the atmosphere, but they also irretrievably change the soil microbiome. In the post-fire environment, ‘fire loving’ microbes that were previously undetectable take over, with unknown results.