Development of Co-Cultures for Benchtop Scale Beta-carotene Production in Microgravity

Biomanufacturing has the potential to be an enabling technology for space exploration and other austere environments, with potential in-situ manufacturing applications that range from the production of food and chemicals to waste reclamation and soil remediation, with many other applications in between. The promising work done through DARPA's B-SURE Program has  focused on single culture development at a small scale to demonstrate feasibility of biomanufacturing in space. Two notable technological gaps are the ability to scale to useful quantities for space applications and the production of CO2 as a result of the biomanufacturing process. Ambrosia Space and the University of Delaware's Cellular Engineering and Applied Synthetic Biology Lab are partnering to close those technological gaps and demonstrate a community culture is possible at the benchtop scale.  To achieve this, Ambrosia Space is engineering a bioreactor system for space deployment. When optimized for microgravity fluid control and built with the same control capabilities as its terrestrial counterparts, in-space bioreactors should be able to achieve similar yields as on Earth. This technology will increase the scale of in-space biomanufacturing to provide appropriate quantities of nutrients for crew during long duration missions. The University of Delaware will expand upon its previous work in the DARPA B-SURE program, where it identified promising Beta-Carotene producing microbes that have thrived in the space environment. This program provides the team the opportunity to identify and screen microbes for co-culture microbes that will provide the lower Carbon Dioxide production needed for spaceflight while minimizing affect on Beta-Carotene production and total waste. The teams will combine their efforts to demonstrate a ground test of the identified co-culture in the microgravity optimized bioreactor. This will be used to demonstrate the growth of the co-culture at an appropriate scale for space applications. By testing in flight-like hardware, Ambrosia Space will also demonstrate the readiness of its benchtop scale bioreactor technology. This also sets up both teams to continue this work to a Phase II study that could involve integrated testing of its hardware in the space environment.