Riverside County Innovation Month Brochure

Agricultural Technology Tiny tomato plants developed at the University of California, Riverside (UCR), could one day feed astronauts on the International Space Station. The plants have minimal leaves and stems but still produce a normal amount of fruit, making them a potentially productive crop for cultivation anywhere with limited soil and natural resources. them also uniquely suited to growing in space. Dubbed Small Plants for Space Expeditions, or SPACE, plants by the researchers, the technology could be applied to other plants to develop a suite of crops for agriculture on the International Space Station and future space colonies.

home to several projects and is home to several active research projects that are being conducted on campus. From Agrobacterium Protocols using potatoes to in vitro Propagation of Macadamia, the PTRC lab is discovering new ways that plants can survive and thrive through evolving impacts of climate change to provide sustainable solutions for 9 billion people on earth by the year 2050.

Something as simple as tomatoes, genetically engineered, aren’t the only thing coming out of the Riverside agricultural powerhouse; the university’s Plant Transformation Research Center (PTRC) is

Now, with a grant from the NASA-funded Translational Research Institute for Space Health, UCR researchers will tweak the tomatoes to make

Astronauts might soon grow SPACE tomatoes developed at UCR’s Plant Transformation Research Center.

NASA grant to UC Riverside to help put tiny tomato plants on the International Space Station

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