The future of sustained space habitation relies heavily on our ability to grow fresh food away from Earth. The Moon-Rice project is a groundbreaking initiative that uses cutting-edge experimental biology to create an ideal future food crop for deep-space outposts and extreme environments back on Earth.

Resupplying food from Earth has been the norm in modern space exploration, but this often comes with pre-prepared meals that rarely contain fresh ingredients. To combat the negative effects of space travel on human health, a reliable source of food rich in vitamins, antioxidants, and fibers is crucial.

The Moon-Rice project aims to develop the perfect crop for sustaining life in space for long-duration missions, such as permanent bases on the Moon or Mars. Dr. Marta Del Bianco, a plant biologist at the Italian Space Agency, explains that one of the major challenges is the current size of crops grown on Earth, even dwarf varieties being too large to be grown reliably in space.

To address this issue, researchers are isolating mutant rice varieties that can grow to just 10 cm high, maximizing production and growth efficiency by altering plant architecture. Additionally, since meat production will be too inefficient for resource- and space-limited space habitats, Dr. Del Bianco’s team is exploring ways to enrich the protein content of the rice.

The Moon-Rice project is not a solo effort but rather a collaborative initiative between three Italian Universities: the University of Milan, Rome ‘Sapienza’, and Naples ‘Federico II’. This four-year project has already shown promising preliminary results.

Dr. Del Bianco’s personal focus is on how the rice plants will cope with micro-gravity. She simulates micro-gravity conditions on Earth by continually rotating the plant so that it doesn’t know where the up and down is. This is the best they can do on Earth, as doing experiments in real microgravity conditions in space is complex and expensive.

Not only can fresh food be more nutritious than pre-cooked and packaged space meals, but it also has significant psychological benefits too. Watching and guiding plants to grow is good for humans, and while pre-cooked or mushy food can be fine for a short period of time, it could become a concern for longer-duration missions.

Space exploration requires astronauts to be in peak physical and psychological condition. If we can make an environment that physically and mentally nourishes the astronauts, it will reduce stress and lower the chances of people making mistakes. In space, the best-case scenario of a mistake is wasted money, and the worst-case scenario is the loss of lives.

The Moon-Rice project has applications beyond space exploration, too. If we can develop a robust crop for space, it could be used at the Arctic and Antarctic poles, or in deserts, or places with only a small amount of indoor space available.

This research will be presented at the Society for Experimental Biology Annual Conference in Antwerp, Belgium on July 9th, 2025.

MIT scientists have made a groundbreaking discovery in boosting the efficiency of an essential enzyme that powers all plant life – rubisco. By using a directed evolution technique, they were able to enhance a version of rubisco found in bacteria from low-oxygen environments by up to 25 percent. This breakthrough has significant implications for improving crop yields and reducing energy waste in plants.

The researchers used a newer mutagenesis technique called MutaT7, which allowed them to perform both mutagenesis and screening in living cells, dramatically speeding up the process. They began with a version of rubisco isolated from semi-anaerobic bacteria known as Gallionellaceae, one of the fastest rubiscos found in nature.

After six rounds of directed evolution, the researchers identified three different mutations that improved the rubisco’s resistance to oxygen and increased its carboxylation efficiency. These mutations are located near the enzyme’s active site, where it performs carboxylation or oxygenation.

The MIT team is now applying this approach to other forms of rubisco, including those found in plants. Plants lose about 30 percent of the energy from sunlight they absorb through a process called photorespiration, which occurs when rubisco acts on oxygen instead of carbon dioxide.

“This really opens the door to a lot of exciting new research, and it’s a step beyond the types of engineering that have dominated rubisco engineering in the past,” said Robert Wilson, a research scientist in the Department of Chemistry. “There are definite benefits to agricultural productivity that could be leveraged through a better rubisco.”

The research was funded by several organizations, including the National Science Foundation and the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab Grand Challenge grant.

This breakthrough has significant implications for improving crop yields and reducing energy waste in plants. The researchers’ directed evolution technique allows them to look at a lot more mutations in the enzyme than has been done in the past, making it a compelling demonstration of successful improvement of a rubisco’s enzymatic properties.

“Fish make hanging motionless in the water column look effortless, and scientists had long assumed that this meant it was a type of rest,” begins the article. However, a new study reveals that fish use nearly twice as much energy when hovering in place compared to resting.

The study, led by scientists at the University of California San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, also details the biomechanics of fish hovering, which includes constant, subtle fin movements to prevent tipping, drifting or rolling. This more robust understanding of how fish actively maintain their position could inform the design of underwater robots or drones facing similar challenges.

The findings, published on July 7 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, overturn the long-standing assumption in the scientific literature that maintaining a stationary position in water is virtually effortless for fish with swim bladders. The reason for this assumption was that nearly all bony fishes have gas-filled sacs called swim bladders that allow them to achieve neutral buoyancy — neither sinking nor rising to the surface. The presence of a swim bladder and the stillness of hovering fish caused the research community to assume hovering was a form of rest that was easy for fish to maintain.

Prior research from lead study author and Scripps marine biologist Valentina Di Santo found that the energy required for skates to swim at various speeds followed a distinct U-shaped curve, with slow and fast swimming requiring the most energy and intermediate speeds being the most energy-efficient. Based on these findings, Di Santo suspected there might be more to hovering than meets the eye.

To learn more, Di Santo and her co-authors conducted experiments with 13 species of fishes with swim bladders. The team placed each fish in a specialized tank and recorded their oxygen consumption during active hovering and motionless resting (when the fish supports its weight with the bottom of the tank). While the fish were hovering, the researchers filmed them with high-speed cameras to capture their fin movements, tracking how each fin moved and how frequently they beat.

The researchers also took a variety of measurements of each fish’s body size and shape. In particular, the scientists measured the physical separation between the fish’s center of mass, which is determined by weight distribution, and its center of buoyancy, which is related to the shape and location of its swim bladder. All these measurements provided a way to quantify how stable or unstable each fish was.

The study found that, contrary to previous assumptions, hovering burns roughly twice as much energy as resting. “Hovering is a bit like trying to balance on a bicycle that’s not moving,” said Di Santo.

Despite having swim bladders that make them nearly weightless, fish are inherently unstable because their center of mass and center of buoyancy don’t align perfectly. This separation creates a tendency to tip and roll, forcing fish to make continuous adjustments with their fins to maintain position. The study found that species with greater separation between their centers of mass and buoyancy used more energy when hovering. This suggests that counteracting instability is one of the factors driving the energy expended during hovering.

“What struck me was how superbly all these fishes maintain a stable posture, despite their intrinsic instability,” said Di Santo.

A fish’s shape and the position of its pectoral fins also influenced its hovering efficiency. Fish with pectoral fins farther back on their body were generally able to burn less energy while hovering, which Di Santo suggested may be due to improved leverage. Long, slender fish, such as the shell dweller cichlid (Lamprologus ocellatus) and the angelfish (Pterophyllum scalare), were found to be less efficient hoverers compared to more compact species like the guppy (Poecilia reticulata) and the zebrafish (Danio rerio).

The study’s findings have significant implications for the design of underwater robots. “By studying how fish achieve this balance, we can gain powerful design principles for building more efficient, responsive underwater technologies,” said Di Santo.

In particular, the findings could help improve the maneuverability of underwater robots, which could allow them to access and explore complex, hard-to-navigate environments like coral reefs or shipwrecks. According to Di Santo, underwater robots have historically been designed with compact shapes that make them stable. As in fish, shapes with more built-in stability are less maneuverable.

“If you want a robot that can maneuver through tight spaces, you might have to learn from these fishes to design in some instability and then add systems that can dynamically maintain stability when needed,” said Di Santo.

The study was co-authored by Xuewei Qi of Stockholm University, Fidji Berio of Scripps Oceanography, Angela Albi of Stockholm University, the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, and the University of Konstanz, and Otar Akanyeti of Aberystwyth University in Wales. The research was supported by the Swedish Research Council, the European Commission, the Stockholm University Brain Imaging Centre and the Whitman Scientist Program at the Marine Biological Laboratory.