Deep Space Travel: What’s on the Menu for Astronauts May Well Come from Cultivated Insect Cells – Tufts Now

Insect cells, said David Kaplan, the Stern Family Professor of Engineering, check all the NASA boxes. They use fewer specialized resources to grow and are highly adaptable to thrive in the environment of a space station.

In space, whats needed are low-cost, simple ingredients you can carry in high density to produce lots of food over long periods of time, he said. The system were proposing is highly efficient. And nutritionally, insects are just as good, if not better, than animal-derived meats, and yet can be produced at much lower cost.

That efficiency makes growing insect cells a promising way to feed people on Earth in a future dominated by climate change, he added. Modern agriculture is carbon-intense, and food scarcity is projected to increase for a growing global population.

Were looking at Earth the same way we look at the space station, but with more problems and in a larger volume, he said. It's all about scale.

That all-encompassing potential for insect-cell cultivating is encapsulated in the name of the Tufts proposal: Deep Space Entomoculture. Natalie Rubio, EG21, coined the word entomoculture for her Ph.D. thesis (entomo is the Greek root for insects). She is the first graduate student in the Kaplan Lab to focus specifically on the possibility of growing insect cells for food production. She did this by applying tissue engineering techniques to cells from insects. The techniques had previously been developed for mammal cells for regenerative medicine, which promotes the repair or replacement of injured cells, tissues, or organs.

Rubio, whose studies were supported by a fellowship from the nonprofit New Harvest, first heard about the concept of cultured meat as a college student committed to animal welfare. I just instantly fell in love with the idea, she said. I knew that was what I was going to do with the rest of my life.

Insect cells may be a better source of deep space protein than cultivated mammal cells, explained Sophie Letcher, EG25, a Ph.D. candidate in biomedical engineering whos working on the project with continued New Harvest funding. Cells from a cow or a pig need to be heated to the temperatures of the animals in which they would naturally grow, while insect cells can be grown at room temperature. Most mammalian cells grown for cultured meat purposes need to be attached to a dish or substrate, which would typically require gravity, but insect cells can more easily grow suspended in a liquid culture media (made up of amino acids, sugar, salts, and other ingredients). And they've actually already been grown in simulated microgravity, said Letcher. Thats a big point of interest.

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Deep Space Travel: What's on the Menu for Astronauts May Well Come from Cultivated Insect Cells - Tufts Now