Plant growth in lunar regolith: current advances in plant responses, regolith engineering, and sustainable lunar agriculture

Sustained human presence on the Moon under NASA’s Artemis programme and analogous international initiatives will require bioregenerative life-support systems capable of producing food in situ using lunar resources. Lunar regolith, the biologically sterile and geochemically reactive substrate covering the lunar surface is the only growth medium available in unlimited quantities; however, it presents a fundamentally hostile environment for plant cultivation. This review synthesises the current state of knowledge on plant growth in lunar regolith and its simulants, spanning regolith physicochemical properties, plant morphological, physiological, and molecular responses; effects of partial lunar gravity and space radiation, candidate crop selection, regolith amendment and bioengineering strategies; plant–microbe interactions; closed-loop resource use; and enabling agricultural technologies. The literature consistently demonstrates that germination in lunar regolith is achievable for diverse species, but is invariably accompanied by oxidative stress, genomic damage, impaired photosynthesis, and metabolic disruption. A set of independently validated amendment strategies, including antioxidant pre-treatment, arbuscular mycorrhizal inoculation, phosphorus-solubilising bacteria, organic amendment, struvite fertilisation, seed priming, and cyanobacterial biofertilisation, substantially improves plant outcomes. However, only one published study has tested a combination of these strategies, arbuscular mycorrhizal inoculation with vermicompost, in a single experimental design, and all other combinations remain untested. The primary constraint on lunar agriculture appears not to be germination feasibility, but sustained reproductive viability and genomic stability across successive plant generations, which remains incompletely resolved by any intervention documented to date. The major knowledge gaps identified include short-term experiment dominance, scarcity of authentic lunar regolith, limited molecular data for food crops, underdeveloped rhizosphere microbiome research, and poor integration with habitat-scale life-support systems. Future progress requires combined intervention experiments, multigenerational food crop trials, standardised reporting protocols, and ultimately flight-validated cultivation systems under genuine lunar surface conditions.