Nitrogen accountancy in space agriculture.

Food production and pharmaceutical synthesis are posited as essential biotechnologies for facilitating human exploration beyond Earth. These technologies not only offer critical green space and food agency to astronauts but also promise to minimize mass and volume requirements through scalable, modular agriculture within closed-loop systems, offering an advantage over traditional bring-along strategies. Despite these benefits, the prevalent model for evaluating such systems exhibits significant limitations.

Mixotrophic growth of a ubiquitous marine diatom.

Diatoms are major players in the global carbon cycle, and their metabolism is affected by ocean conditions. Understanding the impact of changing inorganic nutrients in the oceans on diatoms is crucial, given the changes in global carbon dioxide levels. Here, we present a genome-scale metabolic model (MK1961) for , an in silico resource to understand uncharacterized metabolic functions in this ubiquitous diatom.