India is set to conduct its first-ever biological experiments aboard the International Space Station (ISS) to study the sustainability of human life in space, Science and Technology Jitendra Singh said on Thursday.

An important initiative under the BioE3, these unique experiments, spearheaded by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) in collaboration with the Department of Biotechnology (DBT), will be carried out as part of the upcoming International Space Station (ISS) mission AXIOM-4, with Indian astronaut Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla as a crew member.

Singh said the first experiment at the ISS will examine the impact of microgravity and space radiation on the growth of edible microalgae, a nutrient-rich potential food source for long-duration space missions.

This project is a joint initiative of ISRO, NASA, and DBT and aims to analyse key growth parameters and changes in transcriptomes, proteomes, and metabolomes of different algal species in space, as compared to Earth-based controls.