Growing Plants on the Moon: Plants for Space (P4S) Aims to Transform Food Sustainability in Space and on Earth

Imagine a future where plants support off-Earth habitation and on-Earth sustainability through food, medicine and other material production. The Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence in Plants for Space (P4S) is a consortium of international research partners to support this future.

Five Australian universities work together with industry, academic, and government partners for Plants for Space. The consortium’s website highlights all 35 partners.

The Lunar Effects on Agricultural Flora (LEAF) project is one of several P4S projects, working with NASA and other P4S partners. Dr. Marta Peirats-Llobet, ARC Centre of Excellence in Plants for Space Research Fellow at La Trobe University^®, is part of the team supporting the LEAF project. She has worked with P4S since March 2025, after seven years of research work at La Trobe University.

For this blog post, New England Biolabs had the opportunity to interview Dr. Peirats-Llobet about P4S and how she and the LEAF team are shaping the science of tomorrow.

Inside the Lunar Effects on Agricultural Flora Project

What are Plants for Space’s goals?

The program has four major goals, or we also call them missions. One would be Zero-Waste Plants, where my colleagues and I try to develop plants that can be entirely used by the astronauts. It could be either for food, for medicine, or even for materials.

The second mission is called Complete Nutrition Foods for Health and Wellbeing. In that mission, my colleagues work with plants that should not only feed astronauts but also make them thrive in space. So, you will get a plant that supports physical health as well as mental wellbeing.

The third mission will be On-Demand Bioresources, such as medicines. We will bioengineer the plants so we can produce medicines, but also different kinds of biomaterials or bioproducts that can help up in space.

The fourth mission is called People and Workforce, where teams in our group train and upskill people for future lunar space economy and also STEM needs.

I really like calling them missions, it feels very suitable for space.

Right? Yeah, it’s really cool.

You’re part of the LEAF project — could you give a bit of an overview of what your team is?

This LEAF project will include engineering coming from Space Lab^® [Technologies], and the science teams that include NASA [National Aeronautics and Space Administration], the KSC [Kennedy Space Center], the University of Colorado^® Boulder, Purdue University^®, University of Adelaide, and us here at La Trobe [University].

And what methods does LEAF use? Why are those the methods that you decided on?

Well, I’ll tell you a bit more about what LEAF is and what we do, so you can then get a bit more on the insight of the methods.

LEAF is a plant science experiment that was selected for a NASA Artemis mission. You know that Artemis II was recently launched, and they went and took a trip around the moon? Our LEAF project will be part of the NASA Artemis mission that will land on the moon.

So, the goal of our study, of our LEAF project, is to study how the lunar environment affects plant growth. We want to know photosynthesis [and] stress responses in crops that could support [an] austronaut's life in space or for another kind of space mission.

We are engineering a unique growth chamber that can be sealed, where we will grow two kinds of seeds — Arabidopsis and Brassica rapa. This chamber will provide light, atmosphere, water and nutrients. The plants will also be protected from extreme sunlight and high radiation.

After the astronauts take the chamber outside, on the surface of the moon, the experiment will start. Five days of growth, and then when that’s finished, the astronauts will take a small part of that growth chamber that will return with them to Earth.

Once those grown plants are back to Earth, they will be distributed to the different science teams in our LEAF group. Each group will be in charge of analyzing a different aspect of the plant crops — and that’s where the methods come in.

Each group, or each science team, oversees different aspects of plant growth. One group will do bulk transcriptomics, so they will study the genes. Another will do microbiomics, cell wall analysis, gene regulatory modelling, and particularly — us at La Trobe University, we will study gene expression by using a cutting-edge technology called spatial transcriptomics that allows us to see the gene expression, but at a cellular level. It’s really a top-tier method.

The global aim of this experiment is to be able to compare plants grown on the surface of the moon to plants that will grow on Earth as control, because we want to compare how the high radiation and the low gravity of the moon affect plant growth.

Is the growth container your only project at the moment, or are there other projects?

Well, at the moment, I am mostly focusing my efforts on optimizing the spatial transcriptomics technology for this project. For example, I use a commercial brand called 10X Genomics^®, and this particular technology was designed for mammalian tissues. Plants are a bit different, [so] the technology needs to be optimized. And that’s what I mainly focus my efforts [on] daily.

I need to prep the materials, I need to cut, I need to section, I need to do stainings [to see] if they look good under the microscope... It’s a lot of optimizing.

I know that the Artemis mission is pretty intensive. It takes a lot of long-term planning, but what are your future goals?

Yeah, within the LEAF project at the moment, we are, as I mentioned, trying to optimize the technology because these two plants that we are working on are very different. Arabidopsis is really small and a well-studied model, Brassica rapa is a bit bigger, so I need to decide what part of the plant works better for the sectioning.

We need to preserve the samples on the moon. Preservation also affects the structure of the plant. My experiment plan would be to mimic how the plants would be travelling to space and then find the things that need to be optimized, so when I get the actual sample experiment, I’m ready to go and I do the experiment without hesitation.

How do you think this research made for space can impact people on Earth?

So, optimizing plants for space can seem very odd, [like] ‘oh, why do we need to design plants for space?’ Well, I can tell you that getting the plants adapted for space is the hardest [environmental challenge].

For example, we can benefit on Earth from us trying to improve water and nutrient usage. When you’re in a reduced space like a moon base, for example, or the ISS [International Space Station], you need to grow plants in small spaces. So, vertical farming helps space-grown plants but can also work here on Earth.

Increasing drought tolerance, tolerance to water deficits, that can help here on Earth. Designing resilient plants that can help cope with harsh environments, for example, hypoxia or flooding are problems that we have in space, but we have also on Earth.

Whatever we design for space can also contribute to creating future foods or broader plant innovation. Somebody told me once that if you can grow plants in space, you can grow plants anywhere.

This interview has been edited and condensed.