MIT engineers have implanted spinach leaves with carbon nanotubes, resulting in a hybrid electronic system that they call “plant nanobionics” for detecting dangerous (and other) chemicals.
Strano is the senior author of the paper describing the nanobionic plants in the Oct. 31 issue of Nature Materials. The paper’s lead authors are Min Hao Wong, an MIT graduate student who has started a company called Plantea to further develop this technology, and Juan Pablo Giraldo, a former MIT postdoc who is now an assistant professor at the University of California at Riverside in the Department of Botany and Plant Sciences.
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“You can apply these techniques with any living plant,” says Strano, and that opens the door to novel ways for plants to pick up signals that tell of environmental pollution, and even drought.
Plants “know that there is going to be a drought long before we do,” he says. “They can detect small changes in the properties of soil and water potential. If we tap into those chemical signaling pathways, there is a wealth of information to access.”