Future Mars Astronauts Could Carry Wheat with Them

There are many factors that would make a future trip to Mars difficult to accomplish. Other than the strain that it would place on the astronauts physically and mentally, such a journey would also test the ability of human logistics to a limit. Packing food and drinks for more than 18 months of travel and exploration seems impossible, considering the fact that the spacecraft would have to be as lightweight and fast as possible. One possible way of getting past this issue is highlighted by experiments conducted more than a decade ago, on the Russian space station Mir.

In 1991, wheat plant seeds were ferried to the Mir by scientists, and exposed to the same conditions humans lived in for more than 167 days. Upon their return, they were planted in the soil, and still produced viable offspring, which were fit for human consumption. Recently, Robert Ferl, a molecular biologist at the University of Florida, led a team of researchers that studied the descendants of the plants exposed to microgravity, in an attempt to discover the long-term effects of space exposure.

Surprisingly, the team managed to find no significant difference between the genetic make-up of these plants and that of regular wheat, “born and raised” back on Earth. Thousands of genes and their expression patterns were surveyed, yet the differences proved to be minor, and not at all detrimental to humans. In other words, the plants did not show signs of danger for human consumption. The find could have vast implications for future space exploration missions, especially if ways of growing them on Mars or the Moon can be devised.

“We can find no difference between plants with spaceflight in their heritage or not. This says you can send plants up and bring them back down and they can be the same. Plants, while they are in orbit, do exhibit changes in gene expression because that is a different environment,” Ferl said, quoted by Space. The experts also determined that the changes the plants experienced in space were not passed on to future generations, they reported in the May issue of the journal Astrobiology. “We can still expect wheat plants to be wheat plants once they get to Mars,” the scientist concluded.