Project description:The extent to which plants can enhance human life support on other worlds depends on the ability of plants to thrive in extraterrestrial environments using in situ resources. Using samples from Apollo 11, 12 and 17, we show that the terrestrial plant Arabidopsis thaliana germinates and grows in diverse lunar regoliths. However, our results show that growth is challenging; the lunar regolith plants were slow to develop, expressed genes indicative of ionic stresses, and many showed severe stress morphologies. Therefore, although in situ lunar regolith can be useful for plant production in lunar habitats, they are not benign substrates. The interaction between plants and lunar regolith will need to be further elucidated, and likely mitigated, to enable efficient use of lunar regolith for life support.
Project description:The samples of gut micorbiota were collected in "Lunar Palace 365" experiment. The "Lunar Palace 365" experiment was a 370-day, multicrew, closed experiment carried out in a ground-based experimental BLSS platform named Lunar Palace 1. Deep metaproteomics data analysis was then performed for better understanding the role of gut micorbiota in mood regulation.
Project description:A maturation, sex and lunar phase locked Platynereis head proteome was generated by sampling six heads per biological replicate from male and female Platynereis at defined stages of sexual maturation (immature, premature and mature) at two different moon phases; New moon and Free-running Full moon, meaning the animals would expect a nocturnal light stimulus, Full moon, which was not given. From these heads RNA and protein were extracted simultaneously and used for both transcriptomics (ENA accession no. PRJEB27496) and quantitative proteomics. In total 2290 proteins were identified with two unique peptides as requirement; of these, 1064 proteins were found to be quantifiable (identification in two out of three biological replicates and three out of five technical replicates). Relative quantification revealed that the majority of quantifiable proteins changed during maturation (693 out of 1064 proteins), sexual differences accounted for only 17 differentially expressed proteins, whereas lunar phase differences showed 261 differentially expressed proteins. This finding is in contrast to what was found on the transcriptome levels where differences in between the lunar phases only accounted for only 64 out of 52059 transcripts. To confirm this high degree of lunar regulated proteins a second proteome from immature animals at New moon and Free-running Full moon was undertaken. In this second set, we identified 2095 proteins of which 1671 were considered quantifiable. Of these 173 proteins showed significant differences between the New moon and the Free running full moon phase, thus confirming the previous results of a higher regulation on the protein compared to the transcript levels.