HBISS Recap: A Small Bite for Mankind; Mapping Safe Lunar Sites for Regolith Agriculture; Borja Barbero Barcenilla and Rachel Rivero

HBISS Seminars
, , , , , ,
1

Hi @AWGall

August 27, 2026

Today’s Horizons in Biosciences and Informatics Seminar series (HBISS) with ~70 in attendance featured Dr. Borja Barbero Barcenilla @borjabarbero and Rachel Rivero @rachelcrivero on connecting Apollo-era legacy data to Artemis-era questions: what can we grow, and safely eat, beyond Earth? :seedling: :full_moon:

Borja co-leads the @RegolithAWG and serves as Lunar Science Coordinator at the Moon Village Association. Rachel is a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan and NASA NSTGRO Fellow at Kennedy Space Center, co-leads the Moon Village Association’s Lunar Agriculture and Sustainable Technologies Working Group, and serves in @PlantAWG leadership. Harrison Coker @harrison.coker contributed much of the simulant elemental and imaging analysis and joined the discussion.

Here is the link to view the recording if you were unable to join.

This talk is open science in action. Much of the underlying data comes from 1970s Apollo-era lab notebooks, scanned records, and images digitized by the Life Sciences Data Archive team at NASA Johnson Space Center and curated into OSDR by @kristen.peach. Fifty years later, that salvaged data feeds Artemis-era crop safety planning. Here is a poster from the 2025 HRP-IWS meeting from the LSDA Media Migration Team at JSC on the digitization and records migration.

What Borja and Rachel covered

Can we eat space-grown plants? Lunar settlement needs plants for food, oxygen, CO2 removal, and crew mental health, and the eating question is really a health question: it depends on the crop’s nutrition, its contamination risk, and how astronaut biology responds to flight. The team treats crop and crew as one system and aims at personalized dietary strategies.

Space changes the food and the person. Lettuce grown on Tiangong-2 and ISS Veggie hardware looked nutritionally normal overall but dropped roughly 30% in calcium and 25% in magnesium versus ground controls, a gap that compounds bone loss risk. Astronaut data (NASA Twin Study, Inspiration4, JAXA Cell-Free Epigenome) show calcium signaling and bone formation genes broadly misregulated in flight, so calcium-poor crops would pile onto dysregulation already underway.

Apollo archives, reborn. The team mined newly curated OSDR archival studies (OSD-855, OSD-856, OSD-877, OSD-883) from Dr. Charles Walkinshaw, who ran the first tests of crops exposed to actual Apollo 11, 12, and 17 material in the early 1970s. Plants took up metals directly from lunar fines yet showed no visible damage; decades later, plants grown directly in Apollo regolith germinated but showed clear stress responses. That contrast is why a safety framework matters. Rachel shared never-published images retained in OS-943, the Germfree Plant and Tissue Culture Development and Lunar Challenge Investigations experiment: Brussels sprouts, lettuce, tobacco, Kalanchoe, lime, and pine.

Metals move from regolith into plants. Modern simulants (JSC-1A, LHS-1, LMS-1, LSP-2) track real Apollo geochemistry well. Root-zone-like chemistry releases more elements than water alone, and elemental maps show aluminum and copper concentrated along plant vascular bundles, direct evidence of uptake and transport. Across five crops, uptake was species-dependent: collard greens pulled in the broadest range of heavy metals, so crop selection itself is a mitigation tool.

From plant tissue to human risk. Screening plant concentrations against tolerable daily intake (TDI, the amount of an element a person can safely consume per day) flags aluminum and iron, two of regolith’s most abundant elements, as the top concerns. Linking astronaut gene expression changes to elements via the Comparative Toxicogenomics Database shows responses peaking around day 30 of flight, and pathway analysis ties iron and aluminum to cardiovascular, immune, muscle, and mitochondrial systems that spaceflight already strains. Regolith exposure is a compounding factor, not a new one. Thanks to the @BrainAWG especially @windymc @nilufarali for help interpreting the neurological signal. :brain:

A lunar edibility map. The headline product: for locations across the Moon, how many grams of collard greens could an astronaut eat before aluminum or iron intake hits the TDI? The Moon is not chemically uniform: sites low in iron-bearing (mafic) minerals rank higher, so highlands beat mare, and geology predicts crop safety better than latitude, meaning orbital mineralogy maps can screen sites before any sample return. The best region, around Virtanen Crater on the far side, allowed up to ~269 grams; the most restrictive, in the eastern (Mare Fecunditatis; RS - if i caught that hearing correctly when re-listening), ~1.9 grams. Neither pole ranked among the most favorable materials, so agricultural and operational site selection may diverge. These are screening estimates, not food safety certifications.

Prior work comes from a 2025 OSDR-funded AWG publication Barbero Barcenilla et al. 2025, with the lunar mapping manuscript update (the topic of this HBISS), submitted and in-review.

Key discussion highlights

A rich Q&A that ran well past the hour.

  • Andrew Palmer @apalmer played devil’s advocate on hydroponics versus regolith. Borja: with the right regolith source and crop selection, the screening says regolith agriculture can be done safely, before even counting treatments or biofortification. Andrew noted regolith beat hydroponics on the ratio of edible to inedible plant material.
  • Ryan asked whether safe intake limits should differ on the Moon. Rachel: TDI limits are murky, drawn from scattered environmental and drinking water sources, and vary by body weight and person, which points straight at personalized nutrition.
  • @mschmidtphd (UCF) flagged that elite performer groups show strikingly high rates of hemochromatosis gene variants, which drive iron hyper-accumulation, and proposed screening astronaut crews before adding high-iron regolith-grown crops. Rachel noted OSDR rodent datasets could probe exactly this kind of individual variation.
  • William Hernández @wbhernandez asked about repeat plantings. Fresh regolith degrades plants over generations, but reused, leached regolith stabilizes and even improves growth; leaching is the critical step.
  • Jérôme Juilleret @Subsolum a soil scientist at his first HBISS, asked whether regolith can mature into true soil. Harrison: leach first, then add organic matter, and biocrust on simulants looks like a genuinely open frontier.
  • Laura Fackrell raised phytomining with metal-hungry hyperaccumulator plants; Ryan flagged the Planetary Protection AWG @PPawg phytoremediation folks as an obvious connection.
  • Jon Rask (NASA Ames) described 2007 to 2011 lunar dust reactivity work that helped set the breathable dust exposure limit, never curated or made public, yet. :eyes:
  • Data reuse comes full circle: @harrison.coker SEM, EDS, and nutritional data are ready to submit to OSDR, and Brenna Wheeler from the JSC archival team described the digitization effort behind the Apollo records, with more still in the pipeline. Huge kudos to the JSC team. :100:

The @RegolithAWG meets next on Wednesday, September 16, and subgroup projects are underway, with more in the works, including a Martian map counterpart to this analysis. Interested? Join in. Cheers @lunar_long-fox & @adenvir

Next HBISS

September 22, 2026: Tabular Foundation Models. Deep learning conquered images, then language; tables, where most of science lives, held out until the TabPFN Nature paper in January, 2025. The senior author Frank Hutter, will be presenting how AI/ML finally cracks tabular data. :robot: Watch Forum-Space for details.

All links from the chat and presentation

9 Likes
2

To be more precise, my question concerned long-term trials of pedogenesis to obtain “true” living soils. Do some people plan to use regolith simulants and grow plants on them, then let these plants nourish the soil after they die in order to increase the organic matter content? It’s also possible to inoculate with bacteria (to create biocrusts) beforehand. My idea is to observe the establishment of pedogenesis over several years, as is done on land within the framework of soil engineering.