The irony of the world is that almost every Save the Forest meeting and conference takes place in a well-appointed room decorated with furniture made by cutting down trees. The wood products market was worth $ 631 billion in 2021, and despite all the efforts conservationists are making to prevent deforestation, the $ 900 billion mark is expected to cross the $ 900 billion mark by 2026. So we’ve already lost the battle to save our forests?
Well, not yet, because there is a new solution that promises an end to our need to cut down trees. A team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology claims that lab-grown wood can replace deforestation products made from real wood. They have developed a technique that can produce wood in any shape and size, so for example, if you need a new wooden chair using the researcher’s technique, you can create it in a laboratory without cutting any wood. .
How did researchers create a tree in a laboratory?
MIT researchers conducted an experiment that gave stem cell-like properties to normal plant cells. They extract cells from the leaves of a flowering plant called zinnia elegans and then store them in a liquid medium for a few days. In the next step, the researchers treated the plant cells with a gel-based medium enriched with nutrients and hormones.
After some time, the cells give rise to new plant cells. The researchers also found that by changing the hormonal concentration in the gel medium, they could control the physical and mechanical properties of the newly grown cells. During the experiments, the plant material, which contained high concentrations of hormones, became hard.
“You have hormones in the human body 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 amounts of chemicals can we make dramatic changes in physical performance,” said lead researcher Ashley Beckwith, explaining the role of hormones in plant cell growth.
In addition, Beckwith and her team were able to print 3D specially designed structures from the cells cultured in the gel using a 3D bioprinting method. For three months, the plant-printed plant material was incubated in the dark and the results were shocking. Not only did the laboratory wood survive, but it grew at twice the rate of ordinary wood.
Growing furniture in the laboratory is also waste-free
The assessment suggests that the current process of furniture production leads to the loss of about 30% of the total wood as waste. Interestingly, the 3D bioprinting technique proposed by MIT researchers does not generate any waste and can be used to produce plant material of any shape and size. “The idea is that you can grow these plant materials exactly in the shape you need, so you don’t have to do extraction after the fact that it reduces the amount of energy and waste,” Beckwith said.
So far, scientists have been able to show that the plant material can be grown in a laboratory and its mechanical properties can be manipulated, but research is still at an early stage. More research and experiments are needed before the technique can be further developed and used to produce 3D laboratory furniture on a commercial scale.
“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 particular application “, senior author and scientist Luis Fernando Velazquez-Garcia claims.
Every year, people cut down about 15 billion trees. This massive deforestation is the root cause of many of the problems caused by climate change that our world is currently facing. If successful, lab-grown wood can help us get rid of deforestation once and for all. Let’s hope this soon becomes a reality.
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