Harnessing bioengineered microbes as a versatile platform for space nutrition

Abstract

Human enterprises through the solar system will entail long-duration voyages and habitation creating challenges in maintaining healthy diets. We discuss consolidating multiple sensory and nutritional attributes into microorganisms to develop customizable food production systems with minimal inputs, physical footprint, and waste. We envisage that a yeast collection bioengineered for one-carbon metabolism, optimal nutrition, and diverse textures, tastes, aromas, and colors could serve as a flexible food-production platform. Beyond its potential for supporting humans in space, bioengineered microbial-based food could lead to a new paradigm for Earth’s food manufacturing that provides greater self-sufficiency and removes pressure from natural ecosystems.

Visioning synthetic futures for yeast research within the context of current global techno‐political trends

“…This section presents a summary of emerging trends and how these rapidly‐expanding bioinformational and biophysical engineering technologies might enable development in a variety of newer concepts, including synthetic yeast genomes, synthetic model systems (Figure 3), and, in the long run, the creation of a synthetic cell with which new understandings of biological complexities could be achieved (Dixon & Pretorius, 2020; Dixon et al, 2020). These new frontiers include the construction of fully synthetic yeast genomes (Pretorius & Boeke, 2018); synthetic minimal genomes (Xu et al, 2023); supernumerary neochromosomes (Kutyna et al, 2022; Schindler et al, 2023); synthetic metagenomes (Belda et al, 2021); synthetic yeast communities (Walker & Pretorius, 2022); synthetic specialists yeasts (Dixon et al, 2021a, 2021b; Lee et al, 2016; Llorente et al, 2022); and new‐to‐nature synthetic cells (Frischmon et al, 2021). Given the inherent natural diversity of yeast, we acknowledge too that opportunity lies to engineer other yeast strains including Pichia pastoris ( Komagataella pastoris ), Yarrowia lipolytica and Kluyveromyces marxianus , although most current trends focus on the model, S. cerevisiae .…”

“…In few areas of application will this approach of exploring the final biological frontier be more apparent than in space. To support human viability, future production of food, chemicals and materials in space will almost certainly be based on the deployment of synthetic organisms (Berliner et al, 2021; Montague et al, 2012; Santomartino et al, 2023), of which yeast will play a major role (Llorente et al, 2022). No other technology can promise such low weight at launch, with the ability to use end‐point resources for building biomass and product yield in a dried product.…”