PNNL

Ryan McClure’s attention to microbial behavior is out of this world. The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) scientist helped lead a project that sent soil containing microbes for a stay on the International Space Station in 2022. He also has accumulated years of Earthly experience exploring native soil microbial communities. Much of McClure’s research focuses on carbon cycling by microbes and how this is related to their ability to promote plant growth, survive stress conditions, and even sequester carbon, processing and storing it in the soil for a long time.

“Plants need beneficial soil microbes to help them grow. Microbes can provide nutrients and protect plants from drought, from pathogens, and from other kinds of stress,” said McClure. “Understanding how microbes interact as they do this is a major knowledge gap that needs to be filled if we want to harness microbes for soil health and plant growth promotion both here on Earth and in other environments like space stations.”

McClure helped oversee the experiment that sent microbe-containing soil samples from the eastern Washington community of Prosser to the space station to examine the effects of space conditions, like microgravity and radiation, on how microbes interact to cycle carbon. The information gathered could be used to guide how plants are grown in space stations with microbial helpers. The samples returned first to Earth and then to PNNL in early 2023.

“We definitely found some differences in the microbial community in space versus on the ground,” said McClure. “Now that we know where those changes are and their magnitude, it will be easier to get those positive soil microbiology benefits up into space where we need them.”

McClure also has related microbial communities and projects that explore how microbes can store carbon in soil in a stable and long-term manner. “If we can understand how native microbial communities in the soil sequester carbon in inorganic forms, deep in the soil,” McClure said, “it would be a way for us to use plants to capture carbon, push it down into the soil where microbial communities can act on it and convert it to new, more storable forms, reducing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere and leading to positive environmental benefits.”

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