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As the world enters Space Age 2.0, India’s space ambitions are also entering a new orbit. As work on Gaganyaan proceeds vigorously, Indian academia must also expand its horizons and dream of space habitats and problems related to space biotechnology. In today’s talk, I will share with you some of our exciting work in this domain such as space bricks and biological payloads. To create space bricks, we leveraged a process called biomineralization. Biomineralization refers to the process of mineral precipitation due to chemical alteration of the environment induced by the biological activity. For unicellular organisms such as bacteria, the biomineralization process can be either extracellular or intracellular. Microbially induced calcite precipitation (MICP) is an excellent example of an extracellular mineral deposition. I will present our findings on how MICP can be employed for both hardening of extra-terrestrial regolith into ‘space bricks’. These ‘space bricks’ also motivated us to work on indigenously designed bio-reactors meant for autonomous operation in the microgravity of space. Microbial Analysis in Space (MANAS) is one such biological payload designed at IISc. |