A group of scientists from Linköping University in Sweden have developed the first cyber plants, creating both analog and digital circuits in the life of the Rose. This technology allows scientists to regulate growth and chemical processes in plants, as well as utilize photosynthesis to create new solar cells.
Swedish scientists added the polymer in the natural system of veins and leaf rosettes, from the polymer addition showed the possibility to make electrical components that resemble wires, transistors, and even elements of the screen.
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| An illustration of the electronically-augmented rose. (Picture from: http://bit.ly/1NmEfG1) |
The research team used highly conductive polymer, called PEDOT-S, to form the wiring in the interior of the xylem, the tissue that carries water around the plant. Cables assembled by exposing the cuttings of roses into the polymer solution, which is spread evenly throughout the plant, xylem layer and forming a conductive structure more than 5 cm (2 inches). Because the polymer does not completely fill the xylem, the plant's ability to carry water and nutrients around to be unlimited.
The full sap ions plant (charged molecules) is used by Rose to regulate growth and transportation energy. By using a cable and sap, both capable of creating an electrochemical transistor, changing the ionic signal generating electronic output. This transistor behaves almost exactly like those found in computer and telephone.
Scientists also permeates the leaves of plants with different polymers, other members of the PEDOT, which created the "pixels" around the Rose vessel. By sending electrochemical signals through the vessels, they are able to activate the pixels, change the colors on the leaves with a simple display, switch between light green to dark green.
Professor Magnus Berggren, the leader of the group of scientists who developed this technology, believes that the development of the electronics plant could have a major impact in understanding the plants better, and to develop integrated technologies such as photosynthesis-based fuel cells, bio-sensors, as well as devices that regulate growth and control the functions in plants.
"The expansion of our achievements now, I will find a combination of sensors and delivery devices for plant hormones become major consequences, so that we can sense and record the pattern of chemical signals in plants, and then set the physiology to affect overall growth, flowering time, etc. of the plant," says Professor Berggren.
He stressed that this could create a new field of research. This discovery is the existing knowledge the first time, an achievement. This research has been published in Advances Sciences. *** [EKA | FROM VARIOUS SOURCES | IFLSCIENCE!]
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