Sustained Growth and Terpenoid Indole Alkaloid Biosynthesis in the Medicinal Plant Catharanthus roseus under Simulated Microgravity
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As humanity prepares for long-duration space missions, sustainable life-support systems that integrate food, oxygen, and pharmaceutical production are essential. Catharanthus roseus ( C. roseus ), a medicinal plant that produces clinically important terpenoid indole alkaloids (TIAs) such as the anticancer drugs vinblastine and vincristine, offers unique potential for in situ therapeutic biomanufacturing. However, whether specialized metabolism can be maintained under microgravity (MG) remains unclear. Here, we demonstrate that C. roseus can complete its full life cycle under simulated MG using a three-dimensional (3D) clinostat. MG-grown plants showed increased biomass and successfully flowered. Morphological and transcriptomic analyses revealed that MG induces developmental changes and broad transcriptional reprogramming, particularly in auxin signaling, oxidative stress responses, and meristem regulatory pathways. Single-cell transcriptomic integration revealed that MG-responsive genes are enriched in mesophyll, epidermal, and idioblast cells, which are key sites of TIA biosynthesis. Importantly, MG had only modest effects on TIA production. Expression of core biosynthetic genes remained essentially unchanged, and metabolomic analyses confirmed that catharanthine and vindoline levels were stable in young leaves. At the same time, vinblastine and anhydrovinblastine showed slight reductions in mature tissues. Collectively, our findings provide scientific evidence that a pharmacologically valuable plant can reproduce and maintain specialized metabolism under microgravity analog conditions. C. roseus thus emerges as a promising dual-use crop for future space-based life-support systems, capable of contributing both to crew health and therapeutic self-sufficiency.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it