Chris Powell  00:03

Welcome to Tiny Expeditions, Season two, episode five. Get your helmet and your spacesuit ready. Today, we are going to space. My name is Chris Powell. I'm going to be your storytelling guide for this journey.

Sarah Sharman  00:16

And I'm Dr. Sarah Sharman. Although I'm not an astronaut, I'll be serving as your science advisor for this episode. One thing many of us have in common is that, as a kid, we look up to the sky and we dream about going to space. 

Student 1  00:26

I'd like to go to space.

Chris Powell  00:30

What would you like to do in space? 

Student 1  00:33

Go into the spacecraft. 

Chris Powell  00:35

Cool. 

Student 1  00:36

Drive the spaceship. 

 Student 2  00:39

I'd like to be an astronaut. 

Chris Powell  00:41

Alright, so what would you like to do when you're in space? 

Student 2  00:45

Eat space ice cream and float around. 

Chris Powell  00:48

Eat space ice cream and float around? Matan, what would you eat in space? 

Student 2  00:53

Grapes and bananas. 

 Chris Powell  00:55

Grapes and bananas? So, would you take them with you? Or would you try to grow them while you're up there? 

Student 2  00:59

I would try to grow them up there. 

Chris Powell  01:02

Very cool.

Sarah Sharman  01:09

Today we're going to hear from HudsonAlpha faculty investigator Jeremy Schmutz, and Mark Ciotola, CEO and co-founder of Hudson Alpha associate company SustainSpace.

Chris Powell  01:20

While Jeremy and Mark are brilliant in their respective fields, they have one thing in common with us: as kids, they both dreamed of going to space.

Jeremy Schmutz  01:29

Yeah, I haven't been to space yet. Although, when I was eight, definitely astronaut was right at the top of my list of things that I wanted to do in my life. 

Sarah Sharman  01:39

That's the voice of Jeremy Schmutz from HudsonAlpha.

Mark Ciotola  01:42

I was always interested in space as a child. I always wanted to work for NASA. Actually, I originally wanted to be an astronaut and who knows maybe someday.

Chris Powell  01:49

That's the voice of Mark Ciotola from Sustain space.

Sarah Sharman  01:52

While Mark's dream of becoming an astronaut hasn't come true, yet, he did have the opportunity to work for NASA.

Mark Ciotola  01:59

But I had the opportunity to work at NASA in a variety of roles, both technical and non-technical. And while I was there, I became aware of some of NASA's capabilities, what it was doing well, and what it wasn't doing well. One of those where there were gaps was life support. It could put people in space and support them, but not very efficiently. You'd have to keep on launching lots and lots of stuff up there. So, I saw the need for regenerative life support systems. And a big part of that would be growing plants in space. And so that's where my interest came from.

Chris Powell  02:32

While many of us will go outside, look up at the sky and marvel at the beauty of space, other people like Mark are asking even bigger questions like how do we get more people to space, and once we get to space, how do we take care of them and provide what they need to survive there. The space economy is growing day by day, and companies like Mark's are making sure that what may seem like a dream to some becomes a reality for us. 

Mark Ciotola  02:59

So, the space industry is growing. There are proposals for several space stations. Private space stations, one in Earth orbit, there's one that will be in a particular lunar orbit called the lunar gateway, which will be the first really deep space station. There are specific plans for NASA to initially land people on the moon, but then to create a sustainable lunar base. And this is in addition to Elon’s talk of putting a million people on Mars. So that's a lot of people support. Unless you want to keep on hauling stuff up at say like maybe $10,000 per kilogram or whatever, which is going to require a lot of fuel and produce a lot of carbon, you need to find a way to recycle organic matter and grow food in space. So, you don't have to keep on transporting stuff. If you can do that you can have a self-sustaining cycle of people in space. And for instance, you don't need to keep sending things up there, you can save a lot of costs, and you have a lot more people up there. So that's really valuable. That's kind of the holy grail of this.

Sarah Sharman  04:02

Currently, people in space eat the equivalent of a freeze-dried picnic lunch. Providing them with fresh food is an important goal of the space industry. Mark's company is part of the effort to grow plants in space, an industry called astroculture.

Mark Ciotola  04:17

I had the opportunity to delve more into astroculture. Specifically, I felt that was a gap that really wasn't being addressed well at all. For instance, water recycling has been addressed pretty well. They’re able to circulate and recycle, say up to 97, 98% of water used in space. That's pretty good and they're working to do better. For plants, though, they're not nearly there in terms of biomass recycling. Nowhere near that. Right now, they're growing a few leaves of lettuce per month. Actually, the astronauts get to eat about one leaf of lettuce per month on the space station. And recently, they got to eat a couple of little pieces of chili pepper. And it took us 50 years to get to this point, 50 years of astroculture research and development. So it seems like a lot more could be done. If you want people in the space, a lot more needs to be done.

Chris Powell  05:03

One leaf of lettuce is not enough to feed 1 million people in space. And it took us 50 years to get to that point. So, we need to be asking the question of, well, why is it taking us this long? What are the challenges that we face in being able to produce at a scale that could actually make these visions a reality?

Mark Ciotola  05:23

Plants are a lot like people. And space is pretty hostile toward both plants and people. Space is essentially this really cold vacuum with lots of radiation. If you put a person in space, they'll die very quickly. Same thing with most plants. So, the first challenge is to have an enclosed space to grow plants in that is thermally controlled, that has essentially an atmosphere, adequate pressure, that sort of thing. Fortunately, space stations provide those sorts of environments. You can put them on satellites, too, but the International Space Station, since it's holding humans, it provides a lot of what plants need in terms of protection from the space elements. Then another challenge is illumination. If you want the plants to grow, especially to grow a lot, and do well, you need to illuminate them. You need to give them lots of light. You can't just put them on the surface of a space station because of the vacuum because of the sunlight. And you can't really put glass out there because it'd be pressure not much anywhere. So, the way it's done is through lots of LEDs and things like that. But the thing is, when you're running lots of electricity, and key up all these LEDs to illuminate them to power them you're creating a lot of heat and thermal energy and using up a lot of electricity. Unfortunately, electricity is in short supply in the space station. You wouldn't think so, but it is.

 Sarah Sharman  06:48

The environment that plants face in space is a far cry from their normal habitats on Earth. Mark's company has a device that could address some of the challenges of space life and make growing plants and space easier at a larger scale.

Mark Ciotola  07:01

So, we're prototyping hardware to grow these and we wanted to have a plug and play system where researchers and people growing crops can essentially plug their plant growth chamber into a bigger sort of setup that can provide water, oxygen, thermal control, a lot of things like that, that are necessary for plants and ideally provide some robotic services. Although that's further down the road. We have an idea for a super farm where you have a whole giant rack where you could put these plug and play modules into it.

Chris Powell  07:33

Mark's work is primarily interested in sustaining life in space. Jeremy Schmutz is taking a slightly different approach by using space to help life on Earth. Jeremy and team are currently working with cotton and you guessed it in space.

Jeremy Schmutz  07:48

My name is Jeremy Schmutz, and I work at the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology. I've been here about 14 years since the Institute opened. And my lab primarily works on plant genetics and genomics, and analysis of very large datasets. Our project, which is to send cotton to space, is funded from Target, the retail store. Target had funded a challenge, and the challenge was try to figure out how to use our space resources at the ISS to improve the sustainability of cotton on the earth. And so, a good friend of mine that we worked with many years at Clemson University, Chris Saski, and I got together to apply for this challenge. And it is a hard challenge because what you want to try to do is figure out how to really make best use of space and then the microgravity and extra radiation environment in space to understand something about a plant process. A lot of the work that's been done in this area has been to look at how plants grow, how plants move water in liquid around in the plants in space because it's different in microgravity.

Sarah Sharman  09:01

This particular experiment involves something researchers call cotton transformation.

Jeremy Schmutz  09:06

Cotton transformation is when you take a plant, and you kind of turn it back into an early plant. You retrograde it into cells that are called protoplasts, which are kind of like primordial cells, almost like stem cells you can think of them as in when we talk about medical research. And then you can do things with those cells, including in the plant world, you can put new pieces of DNA into those cells, and that's called transformation. And then you can regrow those cells and turn them back into a plant again, but that plant now contains the new DNA you put into it. This is pretty common. We have, for example, Kankshita Swaminathan here as a faculty member at HudsonAlpha who runs a whole transformation center where she puts new DNA in or, or tests and probes genes that are already in a plant to figure out what it does, and this is like plant biotechnology in a cotton case. The big issue with cotton is that doing this, putting a piece of DNA into cotton and then getting it to regrow into a plant that you can do something with to test, it takes a long time, like two years or three years, depending on the plant. 

Jeremy Schmutz  10:12

And so, working with Chris Saski, his lab has been developing rapid transformation, which means that you can go from these primordial cells to a plant in six to eight months. Our project is to look at different genotypes of cotton, and how those plants respond to transformation and the microgravity and radiation in space versus how they respond on earth. And the reason why this is reasonable to do and interesting is because what we're going to look at is we're not just looking at the DNA and saying, Well, if it's in space, it's going to accumulate some mutations and variation because of the radiation, which is some of the kinds of experiments that have been done. We're looking at the expression of genes in this tissue and this callus tissue, it's called when you're regenerating this plant. And then we're also looking at the epigenetics, we're looking at the DNA methylation and modification that happens on the backbones of DNA. And that's really what we think is driving this difference in the ability of these of these different genotypes to transform at super-fast speeds, or really slow speeds. And so, by putting it into space, we have another environment which affects the methylation could affect and likely affects the methylation of this process.

Chris Powell  11:37

Jeremy mentioned that part of their research involves looking at the epigenetics of cotton. Dr. Sharman, in relation to this research, how would you define epigenetics?

Sarah Sharman  11:47

Epigenetic changes are irreversible changes to DNA, but they don't change the sequence of the DNA, they just change how cells read that DNA sequence and subsequently whether they produce the associated protein. So basically, small molecules or chemical groups will bind to the DNA and affect what we call gene expression. The epigenetic change causes the associated gene to turn on or turn off depending on the molecule and its location on the DNA. So these epigenetic changes are yet another important DNA change that can be studied and targeted by researchers.

Chris Powell  12:24

There's one important thing you need to know about cotton. It's not very diverse genetically. When you want to cross a plant with another plant in order to selectively breed for traits, there needs to be some diversity between the two plants. With cotton, that diversity is just not there.

Jeremy Schmutz  12:41

So sometimes people are like, why is it important to be able to go in and, for example, knock out some genes, or modify a gene and ramp it up? So, expression-wise, in cotton, it's really important because we've done a whole bunch of cotton work over the last 12 years now. We sequenced many different cotton genomes and analyzed many different cotton resources. And we found that cotton, the kind of thing that you would see planted in the fields, has very little genetic variation in it. That's because cotton, tetraploid cotton, was formed about 1.4 million years ago. And that's where two different species came together. They're diploids meaning they only have two copies of DNA. They came together to make four copies of DNA in the tetraploid. And then that pretty much is where all of the cotton that we use in modern times comes from is that one event that occurred in the wild somewhere. And so, we call that a bottleneck crop. And what that means is there's very little genetic variation. And so, when you're trying to breed cotton there's not a lot of genetic variation or diversity to be able to bring into the breeding process. And so, cotton is very difficult, not like when we talk about some other things like we're working on like switchgrass or poplar or something where there's this very large reservoir of diversity out there in the wild, cotton doesn't have that. And so, this project will speed that up to the point where we can take a lot of different kinds of targets and genes that have come out of our previous work looking at cotton, where we have, for example, sequenced all of the wild tetraploid cottons and compare them against several of the modern elite lines of cotton. And we can ask what's different between those, and those become targets to use to test in this new system for transformation of cotton 

Sarah Sharman  14:38

Crosses in plants are made to select for favorable traits that help the plant grow faster and produce more fruit or biomass. We asked Jeremy what traits scientists are currently selecting for in cotton.

Jeremy Schmutz  14:51

So, looking at reducing pesticides and inputs into cotton. We're looking at reducing water use for cotton and looking at improving the quality and production of the bolls that come off the cotton. The other thing that we learned about this, hopefully as we do this project in space first, we learned about how transformation and regeneration of plants works in space, which we have very little data on right now. So that's applicable across lots of species. But also, if we learn how to recreate these fast-transforming strains, that's something that can be moved quite easily to other dicots. In recent years, there's been a lot of development for these rapid transformation abilities in grasses like we work on here at the Institute that you might plant, including things like sorghum or corn, but not that much has been happening in dicots. Dicots are flowering plants that aren't grasses, this includes things like cotton or trees or other things like that.

Sarah Sharman  15:53

While Jeremy's cotton project with Target and Dr. Saski from Clemson is new, Jeremy and the plant genomics team at HudsonAlpha have a long history of working with a large diversity of plants. In fact, half of all the existing high-quality plant reference genomes have been sequenced and assembled by the HudsonAlpha Genome Sequencing Center team.

Jeremy Schmutz  16:15

Our group has been working on cotton from when we were the ones who sequenced the first tetrapod cotton genome, now, eight or nine years ago, a high-quality triploid cotton genome. And we've continued to work in cotton. The wild species that are left with cotton. And then also now we have a large project looking at elite lines of cotton that are coming out of people's breeding programs to try to understand where cotton breeding has been going over the last 20 years. And then how can we continue to try to improve cotton as a crop for the US in the world.

Chris Powell  16:52

While the work of Mark and Jeremy is not directly connected, there is a relationship between HudsonAlpha and Mark’s company Sustain Space. As the space economy continues to expand, there are new private companies in the race to create vehicles to carry both people, supplies, and experiments to and from the space station.

Sarah Sharman  17:12

One of those companies has a plan to land its vehicle at the Huntsville International Airport just 15 minutes away from HudsonAlpha. Mark’s goal is to use this vehicle to deliver samples directly from space to HudsonAlpha. Literally within minutes for sequencing and further testing.

Chris Powell  17:28

This may sound like a vision of the future or may just be our wakeup call that the future is already here.

Sarah Sharman  17:39

To learn more about Sustain Space and the HudsonAlpha Genome Sequencing Center, visit our episode page at Tinyexpeditions.org. You'll find their information in the show notes.

Chris Powell  17:50

Thank you for joining us for this tiny expedition into space. For our season finale, we will be joined by HudsonAlpha faculty investigator Kankshita Swaminathan, she'll help us understand what we can realistically expect from biotechnology and agriculture both now and in the future.

Sarah Sharman  18:06

Tiny Expeditions is a podcast about genetics, DNA, and inheritance from the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology. We're a nonprofit research institution in Huntsville, Alabama.

 Chris Powell  18:18

We've got a campus full of scientists doing public research alongside of companies developing products and services, all with one aim to translate genomic discoveries into real-world applications that make for a healthier, more sustainable world. And that includes everything from cancer research to agriculture for a changing climate.

Sarah Sharman 18:37

If you find this podcast helpful, do us a favor and leave us a review on iTunes or wherever you're listening to this, and tell someone that you listen to this interesting little story about genetics. Knowledge is better when you share it. Thanks for joining us