The connection between people and plants has long been the subject of scientific interest. Imagine that instead of switching on a lamp when it gets dark, you could read by the light of a glowing plant on your desk!
That, my friends, might very easily become a reality in the future.
The engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have taken it a step further — tinkering with the actual composition of plants in order to get them to perform diverse, even outlandish functions. By embedding specialized nanoparticles into the leaves of a watercress plant, they induced the plants to give off dim light for nearly four hours. They believe that, with further optimization, such plants will one day be bright enough to illuminate a workspace.
This technology could also be used to provide low-intensity indoor lighting or to transform trees into self-powered streetlights, all thanks to the nanobionic plants.
Nanobionic plants: Leaves that glow
The prototypes created fall into the nascent discipline of “plant nanobionics,” a research area — and term — devised by MIT’s Strano Research Group. The term combines two concepts — “bionic” which means to give a living thing an artificial capability (like a bionic arm), and “nano” which refers to particles smaller than 100 nanometres that can be used to imbue the living thing with its new capability.
To create their glowing plants, the MIT team turned to luciferase, the enzyme that gives fireflies their glow. Luciferase acts on a molecule called luciferin, causing it to emit light. Another molecule called co-enzyme A helps the process along by removing a reaction byproduct that can inhibit luciferase activity.
The researchers’ early efforts at the start of the project yielded plants that could glow for about 45 minutes, which they have since improved to 3.5 hours. The light generated by one 10-centimeter watercress seedling is currently about one-thousandth of the amount needed to read by, but the researchers believe they can boost the light emitted, as well as the duration of light, by further optimizing the concentration and release rates of the components.
For future versions of this technology, the researchers hope to develop a way to paint or spray the nanoparticles onto plant leaves, which could make it possible to transform trees and other large plants into light sources.
Sources: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), CNN
