Researchers continue to try and figure out how life could work on the Moon. Obviously, we’re not talking about a place where there was once liquid water that could have seeped underground and possibly sustained microbes. But when we talk about building a lunar base, we need to think about becoming self-sustaining, and that means being able to grow our own plants.

And now, scientists have successfully grown plants using just twelve grams of lunar soil.

It turns out that we don’t have a lot of lunar samples on hand, and what we have gets divvied out very carefully, so twelve grams is all the team got. They used it to their advantage, however, by creating single-gram, thimble-sized planters. Each planter got some nutrient solution and a few seeds of a plant called Arabidopsis. The genetic code for this particular plant has been completely mapped out, so the scientists could examine the results down to the expression in the genetic makeup.

Almost all of the twelve tiny pots sprouted plants.

As a control, the same seeds were planted in a terrestrial soil called JSC-1A, which mimics lunar soil. At first, both sets of plants seemed to be growing in similar ways, but as time went on, the actual lunar soil plants appeared to be struggling under the stress of the soil conditions. They grew more slowly or were smaller or just varied widely in size compared to the control group. Co-author Anna-Lisa Paul explains: At the genetic level, the plants were pulling out the tools typically used to cope with stressors, such as salt and metals or oxidative stress, so we can infer that the plants perceive the lunar soil environment as stressful.

There also turned out to be a difference in growth between two different types of lunar soil. Plants in more mature soil – that which has been exposed to more cosmic radiation – struggled more than plants grown in the less mature soils. That’s another issue to take into consideration when planning a location for a lunar base.

On top of everything, the plants may be changing the soil themselves, so the team plans to study the effects on that end of the experiment.

But, hey, we grew plants in lunar soil. Pretty exciting stuff.

More Information

University of Florida press release

“Plants grown in Apollo lunar regolith present stress-associated transcriptomes that inform prospects for lunar exploration,” Anna-Lisa Paul, Stephen M. Elardo and Robert Ferl, 2022 May 12, Communications Biology