Summary

Background On a future lunar habitat, acquiring needed resources in situ will inevitably come from the Lunar regolith. Biomining, i.e. the use of microorganisms to extract metals from the regolith, is sustainable and energy- efficient, making it highly promising for space exploration applications. Given the extensive use of filamentous fungi in industrial biotechnology, we investigated the ability of the fungus Penicillium simplicissimum to extract metals from the European Astronaut Centre lunar regolith simulant 1 (EAC-1 A), which will be used as the analogue soil at the European Lunar Exploration Laboratory (LUNA) facility at the European Space Agency (ESA) and German Aerospace Centre (DLR) site. Results Biocompatibility tests demonstrated P. simplicissimum tolerance to high concentrations of EAC-1 A lunar regolith simulant (up to 60%), both on Earth gravity and Lunar simulated gravity This paper explores the use of the fungus Penicillium simplicissimum for biomining lunar regolith simulant EAC-1 A to extract metals. EAC-1 A is compared to other simulants like JSC-1 A, JSC-2A, NU-LHT-3 M, DNA, and FJS-1. The study highlights the potential of fungal biomining as a sustainable ISRU

Methods and applications