Plants for Space
How can plants be optimised for astronauts in a lab or martian environment?
An exciting and rapidly emerging area for biology is life in Space. By 2040 people will be living on Mars- scientifically, this is the near horizon and well within the lifetime of our students and early career scientists. My group has joined an ambitious international collaboration led by Australian scientists to design and make plants for space habitation with many upcoming events.
Plants are the most efficient systems to provide sustainable food and other chemical materials using energy from the sun. Plants for space must be highly water and space efficient, be able to use recycled waste, and be 100% harvestable for products. They must also provide the psychological benefits known to us on Earth. We are pushing the boundaries of plant diversity and biotechnology to create plants for space.
Water
Water for plant growth and yield production first needs to be accessed and taken up by the plant roots. Water is the most precious resource for agriculture and natural systems, and the frequency and intensity of water for plants is changing due to climate.
We discover how root systems of plants take up water in the dynamic rainfall patterns of Australia. Plant roots and their associated microbiomes constantly adapt at the cellular and developmental levels to take up water. With microbiologists and fluidic scientists, we image, mathematically model, and optimise dynamics of root uptake of variable water supplies.
Our research generates new knowledge that we publish and new designs for plant types that save water, land, and energy for the environment and farming systems.
Technologies include time live imaging, miniature ecosystems that fit under a microscope, and 4D visualisation of roots in soil using computed tomography, working with the Melbourne Brain Imaging Centre Unit. We study Australian native plants, crops, and model plants.
These projects are funded by the Australian Research Council and the National Imaging Facility.
Carbon sequestration
Roots are the first input of carbon into soil, but are the ‘missing half’ of terrestrial carbon accounting because they are out of sight of the human eye. We see a large untapped opportunity to engineer plant roots to increase soil carbon.
Using biotechnology, we are engineering plant root cells to sequester carbon longer in soils. Synthetic biology gives up the tools to switch on or off carbon biochemical pathways in specific cells of roots, at specific times in the crop life.
We aim to design and provide the gene circuitry to plant breeders to make future crop plants that function above ground as normal for food and harvested products, but have roots with the dual function of taking up water and nutrients, as well as increasing soil carbon.
This area has received seed funding from the University of Melbourne E = mc2 program and we are currently looking for industry and philanthropic partners.