Anjali Sharma
GG News Bureau
UNITED NATIONS, 28th March. UN watchdog agency IAEA and Food and Agriculture agencies on Monday said that they are readying to reap the rewards of a ground-breaking ‘astrobotany’ investigation, announced that seeds sent to space in 2022 are now poised to return to Earth.
Rafael Mariano Grossi, head of the IAEA said that “This is science that could have a real impact on people’s lives in the not-too-distant future, by helping us grow stronger crops and feed more people.”
The agencies said that with the world’s population estimated to reach 10 billion by 2050, there is a clear need for innovative solutions through science and technology aimed at producing more food, as well as crops that are more resilient and farming methods that are more sustainable, the agencies said.
IAEA and the FAO are conducting genomic and biological analyses on seeds sent to space in 60 years of experience in inducing plant mutations that could be of benefit to people and planet. Similar experiments have been carried out since 1946.
The experiment is to develop new crops that can adapt to climate change and help boost global food security.
Two kinds of seeds are in space: arabidopsis, a type of cress that has been studied extensively by plant botanists and geneticists, and sorghum, which belongs to the family of millets and is a drought and heat-tolerant grain grown in many developing countries for food, the said
The seeds were sent in an uncrewed cargo shuttle from NASA on 7 November 2022. They were exposed to a complex mixture of cosmic radiation, microgravity, and extreme temperatures, inside and outside the International Space Station.
Scientists at the Joint FAO/IAEA Centre of Nuclear Techniques in Food and Agriculture plan to grow the seeds and screen them for useful traits to better understand space-induced mutations and identify new varieties upon their return in early April.
The agencies said, once grown, a series of analyses will help understand whether cosmic radiation and harsh space conditions can lead to crops becoming more resilient in the face of increasingly difficult growing conditions on Earth.
FAO Director-General Qu Dongyu said “I am very proud of our partnership with IAEA, bearing fruits both on Earth for years, and now with seeds that travelled through space.”
“I am in awe of the resilience of nature, and excited by the endless benefits that space exploration can bring to transform our agrifood systems to be more efficient, more inclusive, more resilient and more sustainable across the globe.”
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