It takes a lot to make a wooden board. Grow a tree, cut it down, transport it, grind it … you get the point. It is a process of decades. Luis Fernando Velásquez-García suggests a simpler solution: “If you want a table, you should just grow a table.”
Researchers in the Velásquez-García group have suggested a way to grow specific plant growths, such as wood and fiber, in a laboratory. Still at an early stage, the idea is similar to rearing meat in some ways – an opportunity to streamline the production of biomaterials. The team demonstrated the idea by growing structures made of wood-like cells from an original sample of cells extracted from zinnia leaves.
While that is still a long way from growing a record, the work provides a potential starting point for innovative approaches to the production of biomaterials that reduce the environmental burden of forestry and agriculture. “The way we get these products has not changed in centuries and is very inefficient,” says Velásquez-García. “This is a real opportunity to overcome that inefficiency.”
The paper will be published in the Journal of Cleaning Production. Ashley Beckwith is a lead author and PhD student in mechanical engineering. Coauthors are consultants Beckwith Velásquez-García, a leading scientist in MIT Microsystems technology labs, and Jeffrey Borenstein, a biochemical engineer at Charles Stark Draper ‘s laboratory.
Beckwith says plants have always been fascinated, and inspiration for this project came when she recently spent time on a farm. She noticed a number of inefficiencies inherent in agriculture – some can be regulated, such as manure draining off fields, and others completely out of the farmer’s control, such as the weather and seasonality. In addition, very few of the harvested plants are used for food or material production.
“That made me think: Can we be more strategic about what we get out of our process? Can we get more results for what we put in?” Beckwith says. “I wanted to find a more efficient way to use land and resources so that we could allow arable areas to remain wild, or stay lower in production but allow more biodiversity.” plant production into the laboratory.
The researchers grew plant-like cloth inside, without soil or sunlight. They started with a zinnia plant, extracting living cells from its leaves. The team cultivated the cells in the middle of melt growth, allowing them to metabolize and multiply. Next, they transferred the cells to a gel and “adjusted” them, Velásquez-García explains. “Plant cells are similar to stem cells in the sense that they can be anything if introduced.”
The researchers forced the cells to grow a hard, wood-like structure using a combination of two plant hormones called auxin and cytokinin. By altering the levels of these hormones in the gel, they controlled the production of lignin in the cells, an organic polymer that lends itself to the wood so firmly. Beckwith states that she evaluated the cell composition and structure of the final product using a fluorescence microscope. “You can visually assess which cells are becoming lignified, and you can measure the proliferation and proliferation of cells.” This method showed that plant cells can be used in a controlled production process, means that a product is optimized for a specific purpose.
Velásquez-García sees this work as an extension of his laboratory’s focus on microfabrication and additive manufacturing techniques such as 3D printing. In this case, the plant cells themselves perform the printing with the help of the gel growth medium. Unlike an unstructured liquid medium, the gel acts as a scaffold for the cells to grow into a specific shape. “The idea is not only to tailor the properties of the material, but also to design the shape from concept,” says Velásquez-García. So he exclaims that one day it will be possible to grow a board, no need for two-on-four or wooden glue.
The technology is far from ready for the market. “The question is whether the technology can scale and be competitive on an economic or life-cycle basis,” said David Stern, a plant biologist at Cornell University who was not involved in the research. He says an extension of this approach would lead to “significant financial and intellectual investment,” possibly from both government and private sources. Stern also celebrates trade in the introduction of forestry and agriculture pieces into the laboratory. “Agriculture uses the sun’s energy through photosynthesis, and – except in irrigated land – natural rainfall. It does not require buildings, heat or artificial light.”
The researchers acknowledge that it is still early days for these laboratory-grown plant figs – the team will be keeping a close eye on the controls, such as hormone levels and the pH of the gel, which affect the final products. “It’s real land,” Velásquez-García said. “One upcoming question is: How did we translate this success into other plant species? It would be naive to think that we can do the same for all species. they have different control buttons. ”
Beckwith also faces challenges in growing plant tissue at large scales, such as enabling gas exchange for the cells. The team hopes to overcome these obstacles by conducting more experiments and eventually building product blueprints for laboratory-grown products, from wood to fiber.
It’s a radical but elegant scene – a “new paradigm,” according to Borenstein. “There is an opportunity here for advances in microfabrication and additive manufacturing technologies, and their application to solve some major problems in the field of agriculture.”
###
This research was partly funded by the Draper Fellow Program.
Written by Daniel Ackerman
Additional background information
Paper: “Biomasses based on tunable plants through in vitro cell culture using the Zinnia elegans model”
https: /
Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! they are not responsible for the accuracy of press releases posted to EurekAlert! by sending institutions or for using any information through the EurekAlert system.