Glow-in-the-dark plants could soon be a part of your garden. Here’s what to know
Ever wanted to spruce up your garden with a rechargeable, glow-in the-dark plant? That may be a reality one day, scientists say.
It’s all thanks to nanoparticle technology that gets “embedded in plant leaves” and charged by LED lighting, according to a study published in the journal Science Advances on Sept. 8.
Plants will emit light for several minutes after 10 seconds of charging the technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers said.
These plants can also emit light that “is 10 times brighter than the first generation of glowing plants” that researchers worked on in 2017, according to a news release.
“We wanted to create a light-emitting plant with particles that will absorb light, store some of it, and emit it gradually,” Michael Strano, the Carbon P. Dubbs professor of chemical engineering at MIT and senior author of the study, said in the release. “This is a big step toward plant-based lighting.”
The light-emitting technology worked in five plant species: basil, watercress, tobacco, daisy and the Thailand elephant ear, researchers said.
Researchers could illuminate the leaves of the Thailand elephant ear, a plant that’s more than a foot wide — “a size that could make the plants useful as an outdoor lighting source,” according to the release.
It works like this: Glowing plants need “light capacitors,” a device that stores light and can release it over time, researchers said. To create this device, they used a material called phosphor formed into nanoparticles, which absorbs “visible or ultraviolet light” and makes plants glow.
The researchers then coated the nanoparticles in silica to protect the plant from damage before embedding it into the surfaces of plant leaves.
Plants glowed for about an hour after just 10 seconds of LED exposure — with light being the “brightest for the first five minutes” and slowly diminishing, researchers said.
Plants can be recharged for at least two weeks, with MIT researchers demonstrating the effect at the Smithsonian Institute of Design in 2019.
“We need to have an intense light, delivered as one pulse for a few seconds, and that can charge it,” Pavlo Gordiichuk, an MIT nanoscientist and study co-author, said in the release. “We also showed that we can use big lenses, such as a Fresnel lens, to transfer our amplified light a distance more than one meter. This is a good step toward creating lighting at a scale that people could use.”
The researchers also found that their nanoparticle technology didn’t hurt plants or prevent them from growing. Over a 10-day period, plants were still able to “photosynthesize normally” and absorb water.
More so, researchers were able to extract 60% of the compound that made the plants glow and reuse them in other plants, the study said.
Now researchers are working on combining their past research, which used particles found in fireflies, to “produce even brighter light, for longer periods of time,” according to the release.
MIT’s research is part of an advancing field of “plant nanobionics” that uses nanoparticles to add new functions to living plants. Researchers say they could potentially replace intensive electric lights.
“The Plant Properties exhibition at the Smithsonian demonstrated a future vision where lighting infrastructure from living plants is an integral part of the spaces where people work and live,” study co-author Sheila Kennedy, a professor of architecture at MIT, said in the release. “If living plants could be the starting point of advanced technology, plants might replace our current unsustainable urban electrical lighting grid for the mutual benefit of all plant-dependent species — including people.”
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