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.

Isolation and characterization of a species for non-axenic growth-associated production of bio-polyesters from sustainable feedstocks.

Unlabelled: Biodegradable plastics are urgently needed to replace petroleum-derived polymeric materials and prevent their accumulation in the environment. To this end, we isolated and characterized a halophilic and alkaliphilic bacterium from the Great Salt Lake in Utah. The isolate was identified as a species and designated "CUBES01.

Domains of life sciences in spacefaring: what, where, and how to get involved.

The integration of biology and spacefaring has led to the development of three interrelated fields: Astrobiology, Bioastronautics, and Space Bioprocess Engineering. Astrobiology is concerned with the study of the origin, evolution, distribution, and future of life in the universe, while Bioastronautics focuses on the effects of spaceflight on biological systems, including human physiology and psychology. Space Bioprocess Engineering, on the other hand, deals with the design, deployment, and management of biotechnology for human exploration.

Microbial biomanufacturing for space-exploration-what to take and when to make.

As renewed interest in human space-exploration intensifies, a coherent and modernized strategy for mission design and planning has become increasingly crucial. Biotechnology has emerged as a promising approach to increase resilience, flexibility, and efficiency of missions, by virtue of its ability to effectively utilize in situ resources and reclaim resources from waste streams. Here we outline four primary mission-classes on Moon and Mars that drive a staged and accretive biomanufacturing strategy.

Data-driven flow-map models for data-efficient discovery of dynamics and fast uncertainty quantification of biological and biochemical systems.

Computational models are increasingly used to investigate and predict the complex dynamics of biological and biochemical systems. Nevertheless, governing equations of a biochemical system may not be (fully) known, which would necessitate learning the system dynamics directly from, often limited and noisy, observed data. On the other hand, when expensive models are available, systematic and efficient quantification of the effects of model uncertainties on quantities of interest can be an arduous task.

Plant-based production and characterization of a promising Fc-fusion protein against microgravity-induced bone density loss.

Microgravity-induced bone loss is a main obstacle for long term space missions as it is difficult to maintain bone mass when loading stimuli is reduced. With a typical bone mineral density loss of 1.5% per month of microgravity exposure, the chances for osteoporosis and fractures may endanger astronauts' health.

Towards an extension of equivalent system mass for human exploration missions on Mars.

NASA mission systems proposals are often compared using an equivalent system mass (ESM) framework, wherein all elements of a technology to deliver an effect-its components, operations, and logistics of delivery-are converted to effective masses, which has a known cost scale in space operations. To date, ESM methods and the tools for system comparison largely fail to consider complexities stemming from multiple transit and operations stages, such as would be required to support a crewed mission to Mars, and thus do not account for different mass equivalency factors during each period and the inter-dependencies of the costs across the mission segments. Further, ESM does not account well for the differential reliabilities of the underlying technologies.

Enhancing Biohybrid CO to Multicarbon Reduction via Adapted Whole-Cell Catalysts.

Catalytic CO conversion to renewable fuel is of utmost importance to establish a carbon-neutral society. Bioelectrochemical CO reduction, in which a solid cathode interfaces with CO-reducing bacteria, represents a promising approach for renewable and sustainable fuel production. The rational design of biocatalysts in the biohybrid system is imperative to effectively reduce CO into valuable chemicals.

Evaluating the Cost of Pharmaceutical Purification for a Long-Duration Space Exploration Medical Foundry.

There are medical treatment vulnerabilities in longer-duration space missions present in the current International Space Station crew health care system with risks, arising from spaceflight-accelerated pharmaceutical degradation and resupply lag times. Bioregenerative life support systems may be a way to close this risk gap by leveraging resource utilization (ISRU) to perform pharmaceutical synthesis and purification. Recent literature has begun to consider biological ISRU using microbes and plants as the basis for pharmaceutical life support technologies.

Molecular pharming to support human life on the moon, mars, and beyond.

Space missions have always assumed that the risk of spacecraft malfunction far outweighs the risk of human system failure. This assumption breaks down for longer duration exploration missions and exposes vulnerabilities in space medical systems. Space agencies can no longer reduce the majority of the human health and performance risks through crew members selection process and emergency re-supply or evacuation.