Cyborg plants have taken over a laboratory in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Thankfully, the nanotube equipped plants are not hostile and the scientists who made them simply gifted the plants with a turbocharged capacity for photosynthesis.
While the new development sounds like something pulled straight out of a science fiction novel, the practical applications of these "bionic plants" are both numerous and infinitely useful for humanity.
Plants are an essential part of the world's ecosystem. They provide oxygen, food, building materials and a valuable source of energy as well. However, MIT scientists have endeavored to improve the already useful abilities of these plants using cutting edge nanotechnology. Using nanomaterials such as nanotubes, scientists can now augment plants for a variety of applications. This can include anything from creating bionic plants that can sense harmful gasses or other pollutants or designing plants with supercharged photosynthetic capabilities.
"Plants are very attractive as a technology platform," said MIT Carbon P. Dubbs professor of chemical engineering Michael Strano. "They repair themselves, they're environmentally stable outside, they survive in harsh environments, and they provide their own power source and water distribution." Strano also led the research team that conducted the study.
The team that designed and created the bionic plants published their findings in the online journal Nature Materials. During the course of the study, the team was able to boost their experimental plant's capacity to capture light by as much as 30 percent. This was accomplished by embedding carbon nanotubes in the plant's chloroplasts. The chloroplast is a plant organelles that is responsible for photosynthesis.
Aside from augmenting plants to be more efficient energy producers, the scientists also used another type of carbon nanotube to augment a different set of plants to be able to detect the presence of nitric oxide in the atmosphere.
"We could someday use these carbon nanotubes to make sensors that detect in real time, at the single-particle level, free radicals or signaling molecules that are at very low-concentration and difficult to detect," Giraldo added.
"Right now, almost no one is working in this emerging field," said Giraldo said. "It's an opportunity for people from plant biology and the chemical engineering nanotechnology community to work together in an area that has a large potential."
The researchers who worked with the augmented plants said that the process could be tailored for specific purposes. Plants could be modified to detect a wide variety of chemicals and compounds such as bacterial toxins, harmful fungi, pesticides and many types of environmental pollutants.
"This is a marvelous demonstration of how nanotechnology can be coupled with synthetic biology to modify and enhance the function of living organisms - in this case, plants," said Boston University professor of biomedical engineering James Collins. "The authors nicely show that self-assembling nanoparticles can be used to enhance the photosynthetic capacity of plants, as well as serve as plant-based biosensors and stress reducers."
