FORESTS, TEXAS – Martian dirt may have all the necessary nutrients to grow rice, one of the most important human foods, planetary scientist Abhilash Ramachandran announced on April 13 at the Moon and Planetary Science Conference. However, the plant can survive with a little help including perchlorate, a chemical that can be toxic to plants and has been detected on the surface of Mars (SN: 11/18/20).
“We want to send people to Mars but we can’t take everything there. It’s going to be expensive,” says Ramachandran, of the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. Growing rice would be ideal because it is easy to prepare, he said. “You just peel off the foil and start boiling.”
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Ramachandran and his colleagues grew rice plants in Martian soil, simulating the basal Mojave Desert. Rice is also grown in pure potting mix and some potting mixes and simulating soil. All the pots were watered once or twice a day.
Rice plants grew in synthetic dirt on Mars, the team found. However, plants develop lighter shoots and finer roots than plants born from potting mixes and hybrids. They also found that adding just 25 percent simulant to potting mix piles helped.
The researchers also tried growing rice in soil with added perchlorate. One rice variety and two genetically modified cultivars—modified for resilience against the environmental stressors of drought—were grown on Mars as dirt and without perchlorate.SN: 9/24/21).
No rice plants grew between 3 P. perchlorate per kilogram of soil. But when the combination was only 1 gram per kilogram, one of the mutant lines grew both a shoot and a root, while the wild variety managed to sprout a root.
The findings suggest that tinkering with the successful mutant gene SnRK1ahumans might one day develop a rice crop suitable for Mars.
#March #nutrients #rice
