By Laurence Tognetti
You're on the fourth human mission to Mars, and you've been tasked with establishing the first self-sustaining food crop on a Martian settlement. You're nervous because you're using a new type of fungi called beneficial fungi, which you're told will help enhance the Martian regolith, enabling it to be used for growing crops.
While growing crops on Mars using fungi might be decades away, this hasn't stopped an international team of scientists from the United States and Brazil from pushing the limits of enhancing crop production through non-traditional methods.
With their findings published in the journal Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences, the researchers discuss how a type of fungi called beneficial fungi could be used to convert the toxic and nutrient-absent lunar and Martian regolith into biologically friendly soil for crop production. Beneficial fungi are a fungi species capable of driving nutrient cycling for plants, soil, and other organisms.
For the study, the researchers used this review article to focus on how the moon and Martian regolith are limited in vital nutrients for growing crops, specifically nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus and how to overcome this.
The researchers discussed how several fungal species on Earth have been observed to promote plant growth through increased nutrient absorption while functioning under abiotic (non-living organism) stress, along with fungal species used on the International Space Station.
Abiotic stress is emphasized since plants will be grown in nutrient‑deprived substrates like lunar and Martian regolith. To overcome this, the researchers suggest using arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF), which have been used in botany since the mid-19th century and function by acting as a microscopic extension of a plant's root system.
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