Tricorder Tech: MinION Sequencing Platform Effectively Detects Transcriptional Activity of Plant Microbes

Healthy plants are vital for successful, long-duration missions in space, as they provide the crew with life support, food production, and psychological benefits.

Identifying changes in microorganisms that associate with plant tissues plays a critical role in optimizing plant health and production in space. A new method of detecting transcription activity of plant microbes using the Oxford Nanopore MinION sequencing platform was recently tested by NASA Space Biology Post-doctoral Fellow Dr. Natasha Haveman of the University of Florida.

Using a key salad crop grown under ISS-like conditions, microbial transcripts enriched from host-microbe total RNA were sequenced. Results show that this enrichment approach was highly reproducible and could be an effective approach for the on-site detection of microbial transcriptional activity.

Findings from this study demonstrate the feasibility of using metatranscriptomics of enriched microbial RNA as a potential method for on-site monitoring of the transcriptional activity of crop microbiomes. Microbes play a critical role in plant growth and development. Monitoring the plant-microbe activity in space will help facilitate and maintain plant health for on-orbit space food production.

Evaluating the lettuce metatranscriptome with MinION sequencing for future spaceflight food production applications, NPJ Microgravity (open access)

Astrobiology, Genomics,