Space agriculture is the study of cultivating crops in microgravity or extraterrestrial environments, such as aboard spacecraft or on future lunar and Martian outposts. It matters for plant science because it reveals how plants sense and respond to gravity, radiation, and altered atmospheric conditions, offering insight into fundamental growth and stress-adaptation mechanisms. This research also underpins efforts to develop resilient crop varieties capable of sustaining long-duration space missions and supporting human life beyond Earth.
Wheat plants grown in simulated microgravity have weaker protective microbial communities in their roots, making them more vulnerable to fungal infection than plants grown under normal gravity. Specific soil bacteria — particularly Paenibacillus — appear to be key to maintaining that protective network.
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Simulated microgravity caused fungal infection to disrupt bacterial-bacterial and bacterial-fungal root networks more severely than the same infection under normal gravity.
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Bacterial network stability — not fungal network stability — was the strongest predictor of plant growth performance, including hormone levels like jasmonic acid and cytokinins.
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Random forest modeling identified Paenibacillus and Microbacteriaceae-related bacteria as the key taxa predicting network stability under these conditions.
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