Crops

Global agriculture is continually challenged by drought, pests, and increasingly unpredictable growing conditions. At the Two Frontiers Project, we look for crop treatments — microbial and otherwise — that increase tolerance to these stresses, on Earth and in space. Our approach, characteristically, is to go to extreme environments — deserts, salt flats, volcanic soils — find the plants that are already thriving there, and study what allows them to do it.

We’re particularly interested in the microorganisms that live in the roots of those plants. It is well established that these organisms — collectively the root microbiome or rhizosphere — can confer tolerance to salt, drought, cold, pests, and plant pathogens. Plants growing in places they have no business growing are almost always doing it with microbial help.

Our first project in this space was a NASA-funded collaboration with Weill Cornell Medical College, Colorado State University, and the University of Florida: growing plants on the moon. By exploring the microbial communities of plants living in environments on Earth most similar to the lunar surface, we’re testing whether those microbes can confer tolerance to the glass-desert-like conditions of lunar regolith — moon dust — in other crops.

The same microbes and methods translate directly to food security on Earth, where climate change is pushing more agricultural regions toward the same desert-like, extreme conditions our target plants already tolerate — from the Sahel to the American Southwest to the drought-stricken farmlands of eastern Colorado.