Bone-boosting lettuce could help Mars astronauts stay healthy

Alex Wilkins

The genetically-modified lettuce could be eaten by astronauts to keep them healthy.

When people spend a long time in space, bone loss is a common problem. On the International Space Station, astronauts need to exercise for at least 2 hours each day and take a bone-preserving drug to limit their effects. If a human spaceflight to Mars is needed, stronger bone-forming drugs that require injections could be needed, which would take up valuable cargo space.

Kevin Yates and his colleagues at the University of California, Davis, used a soil bacterium to transfer a gene that produces a variant of the human version of parathyroid hormone into lettuce. The same variant is used as a drug. The researchers found that the most productive modified lettuce plants produced 10 to 12 milligrams of PTH per kilogram. A person could get all the PTH they need by eating a lot of lettuce.

Yates and his team presented their results at the American Chemical Society Spring 2022 conference in San Diego, California, and they think they will be able to improve on the initial results. They hope that medicine grown from seeds in space will become the norm in the future.

Yates says that this is a new way of thinking and solving problems for space exploration.

Yates thinks the lettuce could be used to treat osteoporosis, a condition that affects millions of people.

In principle, it could be useful in terms of treating osteoporosis. He says that the use of a hormone that builds up tissue like PTH might be unnecessary.

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