MIT engineers plant source, future or replace street lighting

The road ahead may be by emitting trees instead of lamps light, the engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created with bioluminescent plants. The researchers will be special nanoparticles into the watercress leaves, the plant in the past results for the next 4 hours continuously gleaming.

In order to create a light plant, Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineers used a luciferase enzyme. Luciferase can have an effect on the fluorescein molecule, causing it to glow. Also called a molecule of coenzyme A by eliminating a inhibition of luciferase activity reaction by-products, to provide assistance to the luminescent process.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology team will carry these chemical constituents to nanoparticles on different. The correct position of nanoparticles biological enzyme to the plant's help, but also prevents the enzyme to form a kind of plant toxic concentrations. The final watercress plants can be like as a bright lamp.

The researchers believe that through further adjustment, this technology can obtain enough brightness in the workplace or even a whole street lighting, can also be used for low strength of indoor lighting. Department of chemical engineering Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Michael Strano said: "we want to be able to make the plant as a lamp use, but this lamp does not need to plug. The light source in the plant itself will eventually produce energy."

He added: "we opened new doors on new street lamps and indoor lighting, the light came from special processing plants. A luciferase bioluminescence oxidase in many plants exist in vivo." Firefly can emit light through a chemical reaction, in the process of being transformed into the oxidation of fluorescein fluorescein luciferase. This process is very efficient, which means that almost all involved in the reaction are quickly transformed into light energy.

Lighting consumption accounted for about 20% of the world's energy consumption, so the light plant replaced lighting can significantly reduce carbon dioxide emissions using. The researchers initially in this project, only can let the plant light for about 45 minutes, now elevated to 3.5 hours. A 10 cm high watercress seedling light generated by the only normal reading required brightness of 1/1000, but it still can illuminate the words on the page.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology team believes that through further optimization of chemical concentration and release speed, can improve the plant light and duration. For this technique, the research team hopes to develop a way to be printed or sprayed into nanoparticles on a leaf of the plant, so the trees or other large plants into light.

The researchers also confirmed that, after they can carry through adding nanoparcles luciferase inhibitors, light off plants. This makes they could eventually create a can respond to environmental conditions such as sunlight and close the luminescence function of plants.

Source: Science and technology NetEase

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