Massachusetts Institute of Technology
According to United Nations estimates, the global population is expected to grow by 2 billion within the next 30 years, giving rise to an expected increase in demand for food and agricultural products. Today, biotic and abiotic environmental stresses such as plant pathogens, sudden fluctuations in temperature, drought, soil salinity, and toxic metal pollution – made worse by climate change – impair crop productivity and lead to significant losses in agriculture yield worldwide.
New work from the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore, and Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory (TLL) highlights the potential of recently developed analytical tools that can provide tissue-cell or organelle-specific information on living plants in real-time and can be used on any plant species.
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Novel Analytical Tools Developed by SMART Key to Next-Generation Agriculture
Written by AZoOpticsFeb 10 2021
Researchers from the Disruptive & Sustainable Technologies for Agricultural Precision (DiSTAP) Interdisciplinary Research Group (IRG) of Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore, and Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory (TLL), highlight the potential of recently developed analytical tools that are rapid and non-destructive, with a proof of concept through first-generation examples. The analytical tools are able to provide tissue-cell or organelle-specific information on living plants in real-time and can be used on any plant species.
Species-independent analytical platforms can facilitate the creation of feedback-controlled high-density agriculture. Photo Credit: Betsy Skrip, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Spinach is certainly an unbeleafable plant, having been used by scientists to grow human heart tissue and even to make batteries with enough energy to power an electric car. Right now an MIT study is blowing up in the news, with mainstream media outlets claiming that “spinach can send emails.” But can it? Eh, not exactly.
More accurately, scientists insert nanoparticles into spinach leaves, and these nanoparticles are utilized as sensors to detect explosives and also emit infrared light. The spinach absorbs groundwater up through its roots, and when the nanoparticles sense the presence of explosive chemicals in that water, the nano-sensors in the leaves emit signals to an infrared camera, and that camera sends a wireless email alert to let researchers know explosives are present. That’s a far cry from a plant typing out a message to Popeye to remind him to eat his spinach, which a lot of these headlines suggest.
“Plants are very good analytical chemists,” explains Professor Michael Strano told EuroNews. “They have an extensive root network in the soil, are constantly sampling groundwater, and have a way to self-power the transport of that water up into the leaves.” But it’s hard to really talk to plants (though heaven knows I try all the time to talk to my plants, they don’t talk back in very detailed ways). “This is a novel demonstration of how we have overcome the plant/human communication barrier.”
Plant nanobionics is an entire field and, while this experiment was to detect explosives, it can do more, like detect pollution and other environmental issues. Strano has already done this as well, altering how his subject plants photosynthesize to detect the pollutants nitric oxide.