Crops

How do you grow crops in extreme environments, like deserts, where they otherwise wouldn’t survive?

At the 2FP, we’re study exactly this: the science of survival. So our answer to that question, is, of course, to go to those extreme environments, find plants that grow there, and study what allows them to grow despite, say, extraordinary heat. Specifically, we’re interested in the microorganisms that live in the roots of those plants, because it is pretty well established that these organisms can actually confer tolerance to salt, drought, cold, and even plant pathogens.

In our Crops initiative, we are tackling an extremely ambitious, NASA-funded aim with our collaborators at Weill Cornell Medical College, Colorado State University, and the University of Florida: growing plants on the moon. By exploring the microbial communities of plants living in environments on Earth most similar to the lunar surface, we’ll determine if those microbes in question can confer tolerance to the “glass desert“ like conditions of lunar regolith (in other words, moon dust) to other crops.

However, what’s special about this is that if we can grow plants in moon dust — we can grow them just about anywhere. So as climate changes puts more strain on our agriculture systems, causing more desert-like and extreme environments, we can use the microbes we discover and methods we build in our Crops Initiative to ensure the resilience of globally important plants.