Providing food for astronauts during missions not only entails logistic issues but is also quite expensive. This is why scientists at UC Riverside are working on conquering the last frontier for agriculture: Space.

A compact version of a tomato plant developed at the university is expected to reach truly astronomical heights, setting a course for the International Space Station, orbiting some 260 miles above Earth. 

The plant is now undergoing observations at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, and its seeds are in line for a payload flight within the next year or so.

Its voyage will be a generational first: The seeds will germinate in the station’s Advanced Plant Habitat laboratory, 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,” said Robert Jinkerson, an associate professor of chemical and environmental engineering in UCR’s Marlan and Rosemary Bourns College of Engineering.

The tomato is designed to produce fruit in small spaces so it can be a food source for astronauts. It has been years in the making.

Martha Orozco-Cárdenas, director of the Plant Transformation Research Center in UCR’s College of Natural and Agricultural Sciences, used CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technology to downsize ordinary tomato plants and reduce the ratio of leaves and stems to fruit. 

With support from an $800,000 grant from the NASA-funded Translational Research Institute for Space Health, Orozco-Cárdenas, and Jinkerson further engineered and evaluated the plants to determine their “space-worthiness”. 

Dubbed Small Plants for Space Expeditions (SPACE) 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.

*Featured picture by US Riverside.