Biotechnology Beyond Earth
The future of biotechnology is in the stars!
Drug discovery, cell therapies, and gene editing — these are just a few of the things you might think of when I ask you “what is biotech really about?”
It’s no secret that biotechnology is one of the most rapidly evolving fields, and it’s impacting a variety of industries. But what if I told you that space was one of those industries?
Let’s take a look at some of the ways that biotech is being used to tackle issues with space flight!
Microgravity
Microgravity = ‘weak gravity’. It’s pretty much the more technical way to describe weightlessness.
Spending a long time in environments with microgravity causes damages to your bones, muscles, and even your brain! For bones, microgravity causes bone density to change in a similar way to the effects of osteoporosis. In microgravity, bone loss occurs at a rate of 1 to 1.5 percent a month!
Microgravity experiments have been conducted to understand how microgravity affects a variety of things — everything from cancer cells to zucchinis.
Astrogenetix is a company that’s using microgravity to better understand pathogens such as salmonella and Streptococcus aureus. Astrogenetix was able to identify the genes attributed to both pathogens’ ability to cause disease — a process that can take years on Earth as compared to months in microgravity. These identified genes are then deleted to make a vaccine strain. They’re starting development of a salmonella vaccine developed on the ISS.
Understanding how microgravity affects our bodies, especially at the genetic level, could help us understand what kind of technology could be developed to protect astronauts as well!
Limited Resources
Suffice to stay, spaceships don’t have the same resources as the comfortable homes we have here on Earth. It can be tough to grow your food and get macronutrients such as proteins.
One company could change all of that: Solar Foods is a company that produces their own proteins OUT. OF. THIN. AIR.
They utilized CO2 and electricity and a fraction of water to produce an all natural protein they call Solein.
Due to their relatively confined space, spacecrafts see high CO2 concentrations, to the point where it can become toxic for the astronauts. Solar Foods is collaborating with the European Space Agency to expand Solein into these environments. Making Solein is pretty efficient, and it can make quick use of the excess CO2 AND provide astronauts with an essential macronutrient!
Another Potential Solution: Fungi in Space!
Aspergillus niger, or A.niger is a fungus that secretes enzymes that break down food, waster and even polyfibers in plastic! What’s surprising is that A.niger has been found to survive well under conditions with low-gravity and cosmic irradiation, and can be grew in a wide variety of settings, making it ideal for any space biotech experiments!
It can also has the potential to produce a variety of compounds such as such as antibiotics, vitamins, enzymes, conservatives that would be =useful for astronauts during spaceflight as well as terraforming extraterrestrial colonies.
There are a few challenges with using A. niger for space biotech experiments:
1. Having knowledge on fungal biology in the space environment
This is especially true with microgravity, which causes the mutation rate of certain fungal genes to be 2–3 times faster than on Earth.
A.niger did not seem to suffer mutated genes when exposed to microgravity environments in the ISS, but precautions need to be taken to maintain the integrity of any systems that used any type of fungus.
2. The design of spaceflight experiments
The safety of these experiments is crucial for the astronauts and for the spacecraft, so it’s important that the astronauts be trained in fungal biology in order to perform experiments!
3. Developing the right kind of technology to culture these fungi in environments with and without microgravity.
This would require high-throughput research and self-sustained life-support systems in space. Criteria for such systems.
Despite all of these challenges, A.niger is a huge benefit for space biotech in a few ways: production of compounds like vitamins, antibiotics, proteins, etc., mining the soil of planets like Mars, and developing systems for water/waste management!
Looking To The Future…
The above title might be an overstatement, especially since a lot of the projects I’ve mentioned are still in development and likely won’t be implemented for a few years at least.
Nevertheless, it’s clear that the space-biotech relationship works both ways: biotech is being used to combat issues with spaceflight and space provides itself as a platform to accelerate biological research.
It’s crazy to think that in a few years, we’ll be developing drugs in space AND optimizing our bodies for space travel!
Space might be man’s final frontier, but it’s just the next step for biotech!
Thank you for reading my article on space and biotechnology! If you’d like to discuss this in more depth, I’d love to get in touch! You can reach me through Linkedin or through my personal email: writetoapurva@gmail.com. Until next time!
