Researchers manage plant to grow conductive wires in it

Months later, this plants were still alive and the leaves are intact.

Professor Magnus Berggren, Linköping University’s Strategic Research Centre for Organic Bioelectronics director and Organic Electronics professor, led the groundbreaking research where a living plant’s vascular system was used to create an electronic circuit’s key mechanisms.

In the experiment, the researchers made a rose sit in a solution of water and a conductive polymer known as called poly (3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) or PEDOT. The rose sucked up the polymer through its xylem (vascular tissue) via the capillary effect, as if the polymer were water.

Diagram and magnified views showing the PEDOT wires in the rose’s stem. “When Eleni showed me these attractive microscope pictures, we understood immediately: we could make circuits out of this”, Berggren says.

The idea of combining electronics and plants sounds like something you might see in a far-flung corner of Glastonbury festival, but it’s actually been an area of research since the 1990s.

They grew electronic wires as long as 10 centimeters within garden rose stems and turned leaves into patchy electronic displays capable of changing colors between light and dark on demand. The below paragraph gives more information as to what a cyborg rose is and its potential benefits to our society. Their research is detailed in the 20 November 2015 issue of the journal Science Advances.

For around a quarter of a decade, scientists had been seeking a technique to incorporate electronic devices into plants, and their efforts received the driving force they required, when the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation provided them with material support back in 2012.

The electronic rose is “yet another wonderful development in the field of living technologies – hybrids of wetware and hardware”, says Andrew Adamatzky, a professor of unconventional computing at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory in the United Kingdom, who has experimented in the past with applying voltage to lettuce seedlings.

The team’s early attempts to thread conductive polymer wires through the xylem led to the xylem being clogged or the plants exhibiting severe toxic reactions. They introduced this polymer in the stems of roses by soaking them in derivatives of the solution and then recorded results. Once absorbed the synthetic polymer assembles into a conductor of electrical signals. Such transistors could form the basic hardware for more sophisticated plant cyborg devices.

“Previously, we had no good tools for measuring the concentration of various molecules in living plants”, study co-author Ove Nilsson. They tacked gold electrodes and probes along the length of the plant, then connected it to an external resistor and ran a current through it. And in the end, the team expects to make use of the electronic circuits to be created by biological substances, including chlorophyll, avoiding the possibility of environmental pollution consequently, Berggren said.

With the help of more senior scientists working at the Umeå Plant Science Center and Linköping University, their task was to determine whether it was possible to introduce and maybe even produce electronics in plants. Finally, he says, perhaps in the distant future it may be possible to harness plants’ photosynthesis abilities to generate electricity directly, enabling us to reap the sun’s power without destroying the plants. Electrochemical cells are thus formed with a number of pixels, partitioned by the veins.

“Everything occurs naturally, and we use the plants’ own very advanced, unique systems.” he added.

The group is now collaborating with biologists to develop applications for monitoring plant physiology.