Precision nutrition and food biomanufacturing for space missions: Toward intelligent and bioregenerative life-support...

Long-duration spaceflight presents unique physiological and nutritional challenges due to factors such as microgravity, radiation, confinement, and circadian rhythm disruption. These stressors reshape energy metabolism, bone and muscle homeostasis, immune responses, and gut microbiota composition, leading to impaired nutrient absorption and oxidative imbalance. Conventional Earth-based dietary models are inadequate to address such complex interactions, highlighting the need for precise nutritional strategies combined with sustainable in-situ food production systems. This review examines recent advances in precision nutrition and food biomanufacturing technologies aimed at enabling autonomous life support in space. It outlines the physiological basis of nutritional requirements under space conditions, the emergence of integrated monitoring and artificial intelligence (AI)-driven nutritional feedback systems, and the roles of microbial, plant, and cellular manufacturing platforms in producing functional nutrients. The analysis highlights the coupling of energy and material flows among astronauts, the integration of photosynthetic and heterotrophic bioreactors, and the incorporation of digital twins for predictive system regulation. Precision nutrition provides the computational framework for individualized dietary regulation, while biomanufacturing offers the technical means to implement nutrient production within a closed-loop ecosystem. The integration of multi-omics sensing, intelligent modeling, and adaptive bioreactors allows for real-time adjustment of nutrient supply based on individual physiological states. Despite progress, challenges remain in long-term reactor stability, biosafety governance, and multi-species co-culture control, in part because most current systems are still optimized using Earth-derived cost-yield metrics, whereas deep-space deployment critically depends on system robustness, fault tolerance, autonomous repair capacity, and long-term ecological stability. Future space nutrition systems will increasingly rely on AI-guided, self-regulating biomanufacturing to achieve nutritional autonomy, thereby transforming food from a consumable resource into a regenerative and intelligent component of human survival beyond Earth.