{"id":84991,"date":"2021-02-12T07:29:56","date_gmt":"2021-02-12T06:29:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/?p=84991"},"modified":"2021-02-09T12:55:29","modified_gmt":"2021-02-09T11:55:29","slug":"could-lab-grown-plant-tissue-ease-the-environmental-toll-of-logging-and-agriculture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/could-lab-grown-plant-tissue-ease-the-environmental-toll-of-logging-and-agriculture\/","title":{"rendered":"Could lab-grown plant tissue ease the environmental toll of logging and agriculture?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"MIT-Cultured-Plants-01-press_0\"
MIT researchers have proposed a method to grow plant-based materials, like wood and fiber, and have demonstrated the concept by growing a culture of wood-like cells from zinnia leaves, pictured. Credits: Image courtesy of the researchers<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It takes a lot to make a wooden table. Grow a tree, cut it down, transport it, mill it \u2026 you get the point. It\u2019s a decades-long process. Luis Fernando Vel\u00e1squez-Garc\u00eda suggests a simpler solution: \u201cIf you want a table, then you should just grow a table.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Researchers in Vel\u00e1squez-Garc\u00eda\u2019s group have proposed a way to grow certain plant tissues, such as wood and fiber, in a lab. Still in its early stages, the idea is akin in some ways to cultured meat \u2014 an opportunity to streamline the production of biomaterials. The team demonstrated the concept by growing structures made of wood-like cells from an initial sample of cells extracted from zinnia leaves.<\/p>\n

While that\u2019s still a long way from growing a table, the work provides a possible starting point for novel approaches to biomaterials production that ease the environmental burden of forestry and agriculture. \u201cThe way we get these materials hasn\u2019t changed in centuries and is very inefficient,\u201d says Vel\u00e1squez-Garc\u00eda. \u201cThis is a real chance to bypass all that inefficiency.\u201d<\/p>\n

The paper will be published in the Journal of Cleaner Production. Ashley Beckwith is lead author and a PhD student in mechanical engineering. Coauthors are Beckwith\u2019s co-advisors Vel\u00e1squez-Garc\u00eda, a principal scientist in MIT\u2019s Microsystems technology Laboratories, and Jeffrey Borenstein, a biomedical engineer at the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory.<\/p>\n

Beckwith says she\u2019s always been fascinated by plants, and inspiration for this project struck when she recently spent time on a farm. She observed a number of inefficiencies inherent to agriculture \u2014 some can be managed, like fertilizer draining off fields, while others are completely out of the farmer\u2019s control, like weather and seasonality. Plus, only a fraction of the harvested plant is actually used for food or materials production.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat got me thinking: Can we be more strategic about what we\u2019re getting out of our process? Can we get more yield for our inputs?\u201d Beckwith says. \u201cI wanted to find a more efficient way to use land and resources so that we could let more arable areas remain wild, or to remain lower production but allow for greater biodiversity.\u201d So, she brought plant production into the lab.<\/p>\n

The researchers grew wood-like plant tissue indoors, without soil or sunlight. They started with a zinnia plant, extracting live cells from its leaves. The team cultured the cells in a liquid growth medium, allowing them to metabolize and proliferate. Next, they transferred the cells into a gel and \u201ctuned\u201d them, explains Vel\u00e1squez-Garc\u00eda. \u201cPlant cells are similar to stem cells in the sense that they can become anything if they are induced to.\u201d<\/p>\n

The researchers coaxed the cells to grow a rigid, wood-like structure using a mix of two plant hormones called auxin and cytokinin. By varying the levels of these hormones in the gel, they controlled the cells\u2019 production of lignin, an organic polymer that lends wood its firmness. Beckwith says she assessed the cellular composition and structure of the final product using fluorescence microscopy. \u201cYou can visually evaluate which cells are becoming lignified, and you can measure enlargement and elongation of cells.\u201d This procedure demonstrated that plant cells can be used in a controlled production process, resulting in a material optimized for a particular purpose.<\/p>\n

Vel\u00e1squez-Garc\u00eda sees this work as an extension of his lab\u2019s focus on microfabrication and additive manufacturing techniques like 3D printing. In this case, the plant cells themselves do the printing with the aid of the gel growth medium. Unlike an unstructured liquid medium, the gel acts as a scaffold for the cells to grow in a particular shape. \u201cThe idea is not only to tailor the properties of the material, but also to tailor the shape from conception,\u201d says Vel\u00e1squez-Garc\u00eda. Thus, he envisions the possibility of one day growing a table, no two-by-fours or wood glue necessary.<\/p>\n

The technology is far from market-ready. \u201cThe question is whether the technology can scale and be competitive on an economic or lifecycle basis,\u201d says David Stern, a a plant biologist and President of Boyce Thompson Institute, who was not involved with the research. He adds that scaling up this approach \u201cwould take significant financial and intellectual investment,\u201d likely from both government and private sources. Stern also points to tradeoffs in bringing pieces of forestry and agriculture into the lab. \u201cAgriculture uses the sun\u2019s energy through photosynthesis, and \u2014 except in irrigated lands \u2014 natural rainfall. It does not require buildings, heat, or artificial light.\u201d<\/p>\n

The researchers acknowledge it\u2019s still early days for these lab-grown plant tissues \u2014 the team will keep fine-tuning the controls, like hormone levels and pH of the gel, that give rise to the final material\u2019s properties. \u201cIt is really uncharted territory,\u201d says Vel\u00e1squez-Garc\u00eda. \u201cOne pending question is: How do we translate this success to other plant species? It would be na\u00efve to think we can do the same thing for each species. Maybe they have different control knobs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Beckwith also anticipates challenges in growing plant tissues at large scales, such as facilitating gas exchange to the cells. The team hopes to overcome these barriers through further experimentation and eventually build production blueprints for lab-grown products, from wood to fibers.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a radical yet elegant vision \u2014 “a new paradigm,\u201d according to Borenstein. \u201cThere\u2019s an opportunity here to take advances in microfabrication and additive manufacturing technologies, and apply them to solve some really significant problems in the agriculture arena.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This research was funded, in part, by the Draper Fellow Program.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It takes a lot to make a wooden table. Grow a tree, cut it down, transport it, mill it \u2026 you get the point. It\u2019s a decades-long process. Luis Fernando Vel\u00e1squez-Garc\u00eda suggests a simpler solution: \u201cIf you want a table, then you should just grow a table.\u201d Researchers in Vel\u00e1squez-Garc\u00eda\u2019s group have proposed a way […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","nova_meta_subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5572],"tags":[5838],"supplier":[1936,6822],"class_list":["post-84991","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bio-based","tag-bioeconomy","supplier-massachusetts-institute-of-technology","supplier-draper-laboratory"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84991","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84991"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84991\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84991"},{"taxonomy":"supplier","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/supplier?post=84991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}