In an effort to provide an environmentally friendly, low-waste alternative, MIT researchers have pioneered adjustable technology for generating wood-like plant material in the laboratory. Credit: Image courtesy of Luis Fernando Velazquez-Garcia, Ashley Beckwith and others.
Every year, the world loses about 10 million hectares of forests – an area the size of Iceland – due to deforestation. At this rate, some scientists predict that the world’s forests may disappear in 100 to 200 years.
In an effort to provide an environmentally friendly, low-waste alternative, MIT researchers have pioneered an adjustable technique for generating wood-like plant material in a laboratory that can allow someone to “grow” wood as a mass without having to cut trees, process wood, etc.
These researchers have already demonstrated that by adjusting certain chemicals used during the growth process, they can accurately control the physical and mechanical properties of the resulting plant material, such as its hardness and density.
They also show that using 3D bioprinting techniques, they can grow plant material in shapes, sizes and shapes that are not found in nature and that cannot be easily produced using traditional farming methods.
“The idea is that you can grow these plant materials exactly in the shape you need, so you don’t have to do extractive production after the fact that it reduces the amount of energy and waste. There is a lot of potential to expand this and expand three – dimensional structures, “says lead author Ashley Beckwith, a recent Ph.D.
Although still in its early days, this study shows that plant-grown plant materials can be tuned to have specific characteristics that could one day allow researchers to grow wood products with the exact characteristics needed. for a specific application, such as high strength to maintain the walls of a house or certain thermal properties for more efficient room heating, explains senior author Luis Fernando Velazquez-Garcia, chief scientist at MIT’s microsystems technology laboratories.
Jeffrey Borenstein, a biomedical engineer and group leader at the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, joins Beckwith and Velazquez-Garcia. The study was published today in Materials today.
Planting cells
To begin the process of growing plant material in the laboratory, the researchers first isolated cells from the leaves of young Zinnia elegans plants. The cells were cultured in liquid medium for two days, then transferred to a gel-based medium containing nutrients and two different hormones.
Regulating hormone levels at this stage of the process allows researchers to adjust the physical and mechanical properties of the plant cells that grow in this nutrient-rich broth.
“In the human body you have hormones that determine how your cells develop and how certain traits appear. In the same way, by changing the concentrations of hormones in the food broth, plant cells react differently. Only by manipulating these small chemical amounts can we we caused quite dramatic changes in terms of physical results, “Beckwith said.
In a sense, these growing plant cells behave almost like stem cells – researchers can give them signals to tell them what to do, adds Velazquez-Garcia.
They used a 3D printer to extrude the cell culture gel solution into a specific structure in a petri dish and allowed it to incubate in the dark for three months. Even with this incubation period, the researchers’ process is about two orders of magnitude faster than the time it takes for a tree to grow to maturity, Velazquez-Garcia said.
After incubation, the resulting cell-based material is dehydrated and the researchers then evaluate its properties.
Features like wood
They found that lower hormone levels gave plant materials with rounder, open cells that had lower densities, while higher hormone levels led to the growth of plant materials with smaller, denser cells. structures. Higher hormone levels also give plant material that is harder; researchers have been able to grow plant material with a storage modulus (hardness) similar to that of some natural trees.
Another aim of this work is to study what is known as lignification in these laboratory-grown plant materials. Lignin is a polymer that is deposited in the cell walls of plants, making them hard and woody. They found that higher levels of the hormone in the growth medium caused more lignification, which would lead to plant material with more wood-like properties.
Researchers have also shown that with the help of a 3D bioprinting process, plant material can be grown in a customized shape and size. Instead of using a matrix, the process involves the use of a custom computer design file that is fed to a 3D bioprinter that deposits the cell gel culture in a specific form. For example, they managed to grow plant material in the form of a tiny evergreen tree.
Research of this kind is relatively new, says Borenstein.
“This work demonstrates the power that engineering-biology interface technology can bring to an environmental challenge, using the advances originally developed for healthcare applications,” he added.
The researchers also showed that cell cultures could survive and continue to grow for months after printing, and that using a thicker gel to produce thicker structures of plant material did not affect the survival rate of laboratory-grown cells.
“Customizable”
“I think the real opportunity here is to be optimal with what you use and how you use it. If you want to create an object that will serve a purpose, there are mechanical expectations that you must take into account. This process is really personalizable, “said Velazquez-Garcia.
Now that they have demonstrated the effective tuning of this technique, researchers want to continue experimenting so that they can better understand and control cell development. They also want to study how other chemical and genetic factors can drive cell growth.
They hope to appreciate how their method can be transferred to a new species. Zinnia plants do not produce wood, but if this method is used to produce a commercially important wood species, such as pine, the process will have to conform to that species, Velazquez-Garcia said.
Ultimately, he hopes that this work can help motivate other groups to dive into this area of research to help reduce deforestation.
“Trees and forests are an amazing tool to help us manage climate change, so being as strategic as possible with these resources will be a public need in the future,” Beckwith added.
Can laboratory-grown plant tissue alleviate the environmental damage of logging and agriculture? More information: Ashley L. Beckwith et al, Physical, mechanical and microstructural characteristics of new, 3D printed, adjustable, laboratory-grown plant materials generated from Zinnia elegans cell cultures, Materials today (2022). DOI: 10.1016 / j.mattod.2022.02.012 Courtesy of Massachusetts Institute of Technology
This story has been republished courtesy of MIT News (web.mit.edu/newsoffice/), a popular site covering MIT research, innovation and teaching.
Citation: To personalized wood grown in a laboratory (2022, 25 May), extracted on 26 May 2022 from
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