I love the caption on the robotic arm: “addictive manufacturing setup”!
From article: [Chitin is] the primary component of fish scales and fungal cell walls, for example, as well as the exoskeletons of crustaceans and insects. In fact, insects have already been targeted as a key source of protein for a possible Martian base. And since the chitin component of insects has limited nutritional value for humans, extracting it to make building materials "does not hamper or compete with the food supply," the authors wrote.
Keratin is another interesting biological: think turtle shells, animal nails and horns, etc. Very tough and flexible in thin sheets. It's a protein so perhaps there's a mechanical process to mass produce it.
Any reason why they suggest to use/send bugs? Chitin is also present in Fungi, seems like a much better source of that especially if we can engineer Fungi to over-express Chitin.
The article suggested the reason was the use of insects as a food source. Though, thinking about it fungi is a good food source too, and perhaps there is no reason to choose between them.
The energy source doesn’t have to be sugars, lipids and proteins tho it can survive on ammonia and acetate, and you can literally just feed it astronaut shit and it would love it.
Fungi seems to solve a lot of issues, energy efficient as it not dependent on light, can survive and thrive in much harsher conditions than most plants, reproduces very quickly a good source of protein and fatty acids and can be used to process unwanted biomass / organics.
Yeast seems to be a very good source of both food, and construction material (you can make plastic out of it and quite a bit of other stuff fairly easily) it can also be used as a bio-reactor by default it makes ethanol and CO2 as the main byproducts but I’m guessing with some clever engineering those can be adjusted to make many other compounds that might be useful.
With the looming mars and moon space missions if I were a biologist looking for a startup designer yeast would definitely be it.
So wait, are they suggesting that they make the chitin here on earth and ship it off to the moon/mars? Or are they suggesting that they ship insects & food to the moon and mars and create the chitin there?
From article: [Chitin is] the primary component of fish scales and fungal cell walls, for example, as well as the exoskeletons of crustaceans and insects. In fact, insects have already been targeted as a key source of protein for a possible Martian base. And since the chitin component of insects has limited nutritional value for humans, extracting it to make building materials "does not hamper or compete with the food supply," the authors wrote.
Another relevant paper “Chitin from the Mollusc Chiton: Extraction, Characterization and Chitosan Preparation”: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5423262/