3 Things you should know about fecal transplants, solar sails, and precision fermentation
Meet Michelle Campbell Mekarski, Cassandra Marion, and Renée-Claude Goulet.
They are Ingenium’s science advisors, providing expert scientific advice on key subjects relating to the Canada Science and Technology Museum, the Canada Aviation and Space Museum, and the Canada Agriculture and Food Museum.
In this colourful monthly blog series, Ingenium’s science advisors offer up three quirky nuggets related to their areas of expertise. For the February edition, they explore how your poop can save a life, how spacecraft could use solar sails to move through space, and how we can enlist microbes to make whole foods, without the farm.

You can donate blood, plasma, and organs. Did you know you can donate poop, too?
Fecal Microbial Transplants: How Your Poop Could Save a Life
From a young age, we’re taught to wash our hands after using the toilet. Handwashing removes harmful germs and is one of the most effective ways to prevent the spread of illnesses like gastrointestinal and respiratory infections. Also, who wants poop on their hands? Yuck!
Given this, it might surprise you to know that under certain circumstances, donating your poop to someone could save their life.
Gut microbiome
Think of the human body as a space station, home to trillions of bacteria, viruses, fungi, and other microbes that help keep our body (their space station) running. This community of tiny organisms is our microbiome, and it is essential to our survival.
In your digestive system, your gut microbiome helps to break down food, make vitamins, support your immune system, and generally keep things flowing smoothly. In return, your microbiome’s organisms get a warm place to live with an endless supply of food. This amazing, dynamic, and constantly diversifying relationship between us and our microbiome is delicate, and a disturbance to this balance leaves us vulnerable to illness.
Fecal transplants
So what happens if something disrupts our microbiome? One solution is to bring in fresh microbes. This is where fecal microbial transplants (FMTs) come in. An FMT involves transferring a healthy sample of poop into someone whose gut needs help. And no, it’s not really the poop that doctors are after – it’s a sample of the microbiome that comes with it.
Just like blood donation programs, stool donation programs screen potential donors for illnesses, pathogens, parasites, and diseases that could be passed through their poop. From there, “donations” are collected, filtered, frozen, and shipped. The actual transplant can involve a capsule that the patient swallows or, more commonly, through a tube into the colon or stomach. Then, nature takes over as the transplanted microbes multiply and populate their new home.
The most common use of FMT right now is to treat Clostridioides difficile (C. diff) infections. C. diff can cause fevers, cramping, severe diarrhea, kidney failure, intestinal tears, and death. Unfortunately, it is typically very resistant to antibiotics. Remarkably, FMT cures more than 80%–90% of patients, often with just one treatment.
But the potential doesn’t stop there. Researchers are exploring its use for other conditions linked to an imbalanced gut microbiome, such as autoimmune diseases like ulcerative colitis, diabetes, and even mental health disorders like anxiety.
For now, FMT is still an experimental treatment. As promising as it is, a lot of research is still required to make sure we get it right. Our microbiome is complex, and there are risky microbes as well as beneficial ones. Researchers are also working to create synthetic stool substitutes that could provide the benefits of FMT without needing donations.
While it might sound gross, it’s amazing that our poop — something we almost universally consider waste — could hold the key to treating some of medicine’s toughest challenges. Just don’t try it at home.
By Michelle Campbell Mekarski

An artist’s depiction of a solar sail above the Earth.
Solar sail soars around the Earth
Launched in April 2024, NASA’s Advanced Composite Solar Sail System (ACS3) successfully reached orbit and unfurled its sail in August. The ACS3 features a boom structure that deploys a 9-metre-wide sail (80 square metres) from a CubeSat small enough to hold in your hand. While not the first solar sail in space, ACS3 is part of ongoing efforts to develop this technology. So far, the sail is performing well, with the exception of a minor bend in one of the four booms, and it is now preparing for manoeuvres to test navigation and orientation.
Solar sails harness the energy of the Sun as a power source, which produces an efficient and potentially endless source of propulsion in space. When light, specifically photons, collide with the large, flat reflective surface of the solar sail, the induced momentum can accelerate a spacecraft to significant speeds. The sails must be made of very strong but ultra-lightweight reflective material. The larger the sails, the more photons, and thus momentum can be accumulated.
Unlike traditional spacecraft that rely on fuel-powered engines that expel matter to generate thrust, solar sails require no fuel, are lightweight, and can be compacted for launch. They could potentially achieve faster speeds than fuel-based engines over long distances and proximity to the Sun. With fewer moving parts, solar sails are also mechanically simpler than rockets and thrusters.
However, solar sail technology does face challenges. The initial propulsion generated is very small, requiring large surface areas to be effective. In fact, actual solar sails used for long-duration missions will need to be many times the size of current demonstrations to generate sufficient thrust. The amount of light available varies with time and distance from the Sun, and precise manoeuvring systems will be essential to maintain proper orientation, maximize light capture, and navigate to the intended destination.
Solar sail technology is advancing and has the potential to revolutionize long-duration space missions. These types of space technology demonstrations establish innovative ways to unfurl a sail in microgravity, manoeuvre a giant sail, and test sail materials, which represent the first essential steps in forwarding solar propulsion as a viable solution. As demonstrations continue to unfold, we may see solar sails playing a major role in space exploration, including missions to distant destinations like Alpha Centauri.
Go Further:
Solar sail missions:
- The Japanese IKAROS mission launched in 2010.
- LightSail 1 and LightSail2 launched in 2015 and 2019, respectively were successful crowd funded missions.
- NEA Scout: Solar sail launched on Artemis I mission, but communications failed.
By Cassandra Marion

Using precision fermentation, we can brew all kinds of useful and valuable products, including animal proteins, in similar types of systems as high-tech beer breweries use.
Precision Fermentation: Food without the farm?
An innovative food technology is making waves for its potential as a sustainability game changer: precision fermentation. Imagine creating whole food products without the need for animals or plants—sounds like science fiction, right? Well, this futuristic-sounding technology has been quietly working its magic for more than 30 years, producing essentials like rennet (used in cheesemaking), natural sugar substitute stevia, vitamins, and even insulin.
Now, with recent breakthroughs in cellular agriculture (read our 3 things on the topic), precision fermentation is stepping into the spotlight as a serious contender for transforming how we produce not just food additives and health products but also high-value foods such as proteins.
Humans have been harnessing the power of microbes to transform food for millennia—think yogurt, cheese, beer, wine, soy sauce, vinegar, sauerkraut, kombucha, and even bread and tempeh. All of these owe their existence to good old-fashioned fermentation. When we give certain microbes a cozy environment, and a source of food, they release new compounds as they chow and reproduce. Precision fermentation takes things to the next level. Here, scientists use gene editing techniques such as CRISPR to give microbes (like bacteria, fungi, or algae) the ability to make new compounds. By adding an exact copy of a gene from plants or animals to the microbes’ genetic code, they essentially hand the microbes a brand new recipe. It’s like upgrading a microbe’s cookbook with a winning recipe for producing, say, milk proteins, egg whites, or flavour molecules.
The microbes are reared in giant vats under tightly controlled conditions (temperature, stirring, and nutrients—like a five-star hotel for microorganisms). The microbes munch on food, follow their new recipe, and churn out the desired product. Once they’re done “brewing,” the microbes are filtered out, leaving behind the pure product. Even though genetically modified microbes are doing the work, the final product contains zero genetic material. So, technically, these products aren’t classified as genetically modified foods. This creates some interesting questions about how they should be labelled—but more on that another time.
And precision fermentation is already producing incredible things!
- Egg whites: Real egg albumin (the key protein in egg whites) without a single chicken involved. It’s identical in taste, texture, and nutrition.
- Milk proteins: Companies are crafting dairy proteins like casein and whey without cows.
- Natural food colours: Scientists are creating the entire rainbow of food dyes more sustainably, and can replace synthetic dyes and resource-intensive extraction of natural dyes.
- Heme for plant-based meat: This iron-containing molecule gives plant-based burgers their “meaty” taste and appearance.
- Collagen and animal fats: Yes, even collagen for your skincare routine or animal fats for cooking.
While we’re still years away from making complex products like steaks or gourmet meats, precision fermentation is already proving its worth. Unlike cellular agriculture (which relies on animal stem cells and remains expensive), precision fermentation could offer a faster, cheaper, and more sustainable alternative for many high-value food components. And the potential doesn’t stop on Earth. Imagine using precision fermentation to produce food for astronauts on Mars! Back home, with a growing population, shrinking farmland, and rising demand for protein, this technology could help ease the strain on our overstretched agricultural systems.
Precision fermentation is a fascinating and promising tool in the quest for sustainable food production. From animal-free proteins to vibrant natural dyes, it’s opening doors to a more efficient and eco-friendly future, and every potential tool is worth exploring.
By Renée-Claude Goulet
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