Mycorrhizal Fungi Enable Chickpea Seed Production in Simulated Lunar Regolith

Scientists have successfully grown chickpeas in lunar soil simulant, marking a major milestone for space agriculture. For the first time, a food crop completed its entire life cycle from seed to seed production in a substrate composed largely of simulated lunar regolith.

For the first time, scientists have grown a food crop to full seed production in simulated lunar regolith. By inoculating chickpea (Cicer arietinum) seeds with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF), researchers enabled plants to complete their reproductive cycle in a substrate composed of up to 75% lunar soil simulant. The breakthrough demonstrates how ancient plant–fungus symbioses could support agriculture in future lunar habitats.

A study published on 5 March 2026 in Scientific Reports by researchers from Texas A&M University and the University of Texas at Austin demonstrates that chickpeas can grow, flower, and produce seeds in substrates containing up to 75% lunar regolith simulant. The key enabling factor was inoculation with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, microorganisms that enhance nutrient uptake and immobilize toxic metals.

Why Lunar Soil Is Problem to Plant Growth

Lunar regolith the technical term for the powdery surface layer that blankets the Moon is not soil in any meaningful agricultural sense. Formed over billions of years by meteorite bombardment and bombardment by solar wind, it is a collection of fine, glassy, angularly fractured particles bearing little resemblance to Earth’s living, nutrient-cycling substrate. It contains no organic matter. It harbours no microorganisms. And it carries elevated concentrations of heavy metals iron, aluminium, copper, zinc that accumulate to phytotoxic levels in plant tissue.

The physical structure of regolith compounds these chemical liabilities. Unlike Earth soils, which form stable aggregates capable of holding water and air simultaneously, regolith particles do not bind together. Water flows through it erratically; roots struggle to anchor and hydrate. When University of Florida researchers Anna-Lisa Paul and Robert Ferl first grew the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana in genuine Apollo-era samples in 2022, the plants germinated and survived but under profound duress. Transcriptomic analyses published in Communications Biology showed that every plant grown in actual lunar soil differentially expressed genes indicating ionic stress responses similar to those triggered by salt toxicity, heavy metal exposure, and reactive oxygen species. Growth was stunted. Development was erratic. No crop plant had yet been persuaded to complete its full reproductive cycle in regolith of any kind.

“It is a hazard unamended. To have arable soil, you need two things: organic matter and microorganisms. The Moon has neither.”
Jessica Atkin, Texas A&M University, lead author

Experimental Strategy: Regolith Simulant, Vermicompost, and Mycorrhizal Fungi

The Texas A&M team, led by doctoral candidate Jessica Atkin and principal investigator Sara Oliveira Santos (University of Texas at Austin), designed an intervention strategy built around three components, each targeting a specific deficiency of lunar substrate.

The first was a high-fidelity lunar regolith simulant from Exolith Labs, engineered to 99 per cent mineralogical accuracy against Apollo-era lunar samples, and specifically modelled on the surface composition expected at landing sites for NASA’s Artemis programme. Unlike actual regolith of which humanity possesses only about 382 kilograms, all of it precious simulant can be produced in quantity sufficient for systematic agriculture research.

The second was vermicompost the nutrient-rich excretion of red wiggler earthworms digesting organic waste. Beyond its value as a slow-release fertiliser, vermicompost introduces a living microbial community into otherwise sterile substrate. Atkin highlights a particularly elegant logistical alignment: NASA already runs a programme on the International Space Station that feeds mission waste food scraps, cotton clothing fibres, hygiene products to composting worms. A vermicomposting loop could convert otherwise discarded mission organics into agricultural amendment, reducing both waste and the need for Earth resupply.

The third component was the experiment’s most consequential: spores of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF), applied as a coating to chickpea seeds before planting. AMF form one of the deepest mutualisms in plant evolutionary history, colonising the roots of more than 80 per cent of all terrestrial plant species. Their microscopic hyphae extend far beyond the reach of any root system, greatly expanding the effective absorptive surface area. In exchange for photosynthetically fixed carbon from the plant, the fungi deliver phosphorus, water, and micronutrients. Critically, AMF are also documented metal sequesters they can trap toxic heavy metals within fungal tissue, substantially reducing the amount that migrates into plant organs. It is the strategy by which the first land plants survived a world without soil, over 400 million years ago.

Experimental Results and Key Outcomes

The team grew the ‘Myles’ variety of chickpea selected for compact growth habit and abiotic stress tolerance across four simulant concentrations (25, 50, 75, and 100 per cent), each tested with and without AMF inoculation, under climate-controlled conditions. A cotton wick-based drip irrigation system was developed specifically to deliver water to the root zone, compensating for the simulant’s poor water retention.

Key Findings at a Glance

EXTRATERRESTRIAL BOTANY UNIT — CHICKPEA (C. ARIETINUM)

Reproductive Cycle

‘Myles’ chickpeas produced harvestable seeds in mixtures up to 75% lunar regolith—the first food crop to complete a full reproductive cycle in regolith.

Inoculation Factor

AMF inoculation was decisive: Zero untreated plants produced seeds. Seed production occurred exclusively in fungal-treated specimens.

Seed Consistency

While total counts declined at higher concentrations, individual seed weight remained consistent across all successful growth groups.

Survival Extension

In 100% simulant, AMF plants survived two weeks longer than controls, although neither group reached the flowering stage.

System Sustainability

AMF successfully colonized 100% regolith, suggesting an initial inoculation could be self-sustaining in a real lunar agricultural habitat.

Soil Engineering

Fungal activity improved the structural aggregation of particles, solving one of regolith’s most difficult agronomic liabilities.

STATUS: Safety for human consumption (heavy metal accumulation) remains under active investigation.

The structural improvement of the simulant warrants particular attention. Soil aggregation the binding of particles into stable clusters that can retain both water and air is foundational to productive agriculture, and regolith’s utter lack of it is one of its most fundamental problems. AMF secrete a glycoprotein called glomulin that acts as a biological adhesive, binding mineral particles together. Within a single growing cycle, the team observed measurable improvements in simulant cohesion in inoculated treatments. “Everybody gets so focused on the crop,” Atkin noted, “they forget there’s this huge transformation going on so that we can even use the regolith.” The fungus is not just feeding the plant it is reforming the substrate itself.

Why Chickpea (Cicer arietinum) Was Selected as the Model Crop

Cicer arietinum was not chosen by default. As a legume, chickpeas are capable of hosting nitrogen-fixing bacteria in root nodules, providing a biological mechanism for generating this critical macronutrient from atmospheric sources rather than external supply. The plant is nutritionally dense rich in protein, complex carbohydrates, iron, phosphorus, calcium, and B vitamins while requiring comparatively little water or nitrogen input. And chickpea roots actively signal to recruit AMF through root exudates, making Cicer arietinum an unusually cooperative partner for the fungal strategy the team deployed.

The ‘Myles’ variety was selected for its compact growth architecture an asset in the space-constrained growing environments envisaged for lunar surface habitats and for its documented resilience to the kinds of ionic and oxidative stress that heavy metal-laden regolith imposes. From a mission-planning perspective, its nutritional density per unit of growing footprint compares favourably with most candidate space crops.

“Back in the day, plants and fungi were both in the water, and they linked up to colonise land. I thought why can they not colonise the Moon?”
Jessica Atkin

Food Safety Concerns: Heavy Metal Uptake in Lunar Agriculture

The most pressing unresolved issue is food safety. Regolith simulant contains heavy metals that, if incorporated into edible seed tissue, could be harmful to human consumers. AMF are known to mitigate this risk by sequestering metals in fungal tissue the Boing Boing synthesis of early reporting noted that treated seeds took up measurably fewer toxic metals than untreated ones but whether that protection is sufficient across multiple generations of lunar cropping is an open empirical question.

Atkin frames it directly: the team still needs to determine whether the chickpeas are nutritious enough for astronaut requirements, and if toxic metal uptake is a problem, how many successive growing generations in progressively conditioned regolith it would take to produce a crop that is genuinely safe to eat. The research group, now supported by a NASA FINESST grant, is actively investigating both questions.

Plant Growth Experiments Using Apollo Lunar Samples (HISTORICAL)

This result sits at the end of a scientific lineage that begins with the lunar samples returned between 1969 and 1972. Paul and Ferl’s 2022 Communications Biology paper the first demonstration of plant growth in genuine lunar material using modern molecular biology established that Arabidopsis could survive in regolith but not thrive, and that the substrate triggered gene expression profiles consistent with severe abiotic stress. That landmark result also showed that plant responses differed by Apollo collection site: plants in Apollo 11’s more “mature” regolith (exposed longer to cosmic wind) showed the most severe stress, suggesting that radiation history, not just chemical composition, shapes regolith’s phytotoxicity.

The new study moves substantially beyond that baseline: a nutritionally meaningful crop, grown to reproductive completion, in a medium designed to match the geology of future Artemis landing sites. The jump from stress-afflicted Arabidopsis to seed-bearing chickpea in just four years reflects how rapidly the field of regolith-based agriculture is maturing.

Limitations of the Current Study

The limitations of the study are worth stating plainly. The growing medium was a simulant, not actual lunar regolith the real material, shaped by billions of years of radiation and micrometeorite gardening, will present challenges no simulant fully replicates. All plants in every simulant treatment showed some degree of stress throughout the experiment. No plants in 100 per cent simulant reached flowering. Metal content in harvested seeds was not measured in this study. And the entire experiment was conducted under controlled Earth-surface conditions: lunar gravity (about one-sixth of Earth’s), the radiation environment inside a surface habitat, and the lighting constraints of a lunar day-night cycle were not factors.

Multi-generational cultivation experiments testing whether successive growing cycles progressively improve regolith structure and reduce phytotoxic metal availability are the logical next step, and the team is already planning them. Parallel Martian regolith trials are underway, though Mars introduces its own acute challenges: perchlorate compounds toxic to plants, a different mineral chemistry, and greater distance from any resupply option.

What It Means for Artemis

For NASA’s Artemis programme which envisions sustained human presence on the lunar surface before the end of this decade the practical implications of this research are direct. Every kilogram of food that can be produced from on-site resources is a kilogram that does not need to be launched from Earth at a cost that currently runs to tens of thousands of dollars per kilogram to low Earth orbit, and far more beyond. The AMF-vermicompost strategy is logistically lean: fungal inoculants are lightweight, vermicomposting infrastructure is compact, and the substrate is already present in essentially unlimited supply at any landing site.

Whether the Moon will ever support anything resembling a working farm remains genuinely uncertain. But as Atkin put it simply: “My goal is to get them grown on the moon. Right now we’ve got to do all the ground testing.” In March 2026, that ground testing has just yielded its most persuasive result yet.