The US space firm has partnered with the Abu Dhabi Investment Office (ADIO) and plans to set up the StarLab Space Farming Centre in the UAE, where teams of researchers would study and select promising types of bacteria, microbes, biofilms and plants that would subsequently be sent to space to undergo mutations. Nanoracks now wants to emulate China’s success in cooperation with the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a parched Arabian country that imports about 90 per cent of the food it needs to feed its inhabitants. “These plants evolve in space either through changes on the genetic level or through the effects of radiation, the absence of gravity, or a combination of all these factors.”Ĭhina Daily claims that since approving its first type of space rice in 2003 for human consumption, China’s high-yielding disease-resistant space crops have helped alleviate poverty in many arid regions including the Tibetan plateau. “There have been many published papers over the years showing specific instances where in the harsh environment some interesting biomass products emerge that can do quite well even in desert conditions,” Jeffrey Manber, the CEO of Nanoracks, told E&T. On Earth, in comparison, these mutations occur at a rate of one in 200,000, according to Guo Rui, director of the Shaanxi Province Engineering Research Centre for Plant Space Breeding, who was quoted by the South China Post in 2018.įurther experimentation with the space-mutated crops led to the creation of more than 200 new mutant variants of crops including rice, wheat, cotton, sesame, pepper, tomato and alfalfa that have been, according to China Daily, released to Chinese farmers. The researchers found that in the extreme environment of space, with its cosmic radiation, microgravity and weak magnetic field, mutations in the DNA of plants occur at an increased rate of 1 per cent. The eastern superpower has sent seeds of various species up on recoverable satellites, high-altitude platforms and the Shenzou spacecraft. Space mutagenesis, as an extreme form of such crop treatment, has been used in China in particular since 1987, according to the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Gamma rays, X-rays, fast neutrons and UV light have all been successfully tested on seeds, seedlings or pollen to create more resilient crops resistant to pests and extreme weather and capable of producing higher yields. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, breeders have been using extreme physical stressors such as ionising radiation to create new heritable mutations in the DNA of plants for more than 70 years. The plan seems to have some backing in science. American commercial space services company Nanoracks has ambitious plans to operate orbital greenhouses where it would create mutant crops that could save the Earth from famine amid progressing climate change.
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