A group of researchers who intend to protect flowering plants in the future by using sensors have created a cyborg roses with tiny electronic polymers. The research team’s goal is to eventually allow blooming plants to be a lot more productive, and to avoid plants from flowering during a frost incident.
Scientists Create Cyborg Roses
Led by postdoctoral researcher and writer Eleni Stavrinidou, the team has produced cyborg roses that have digital circuits successfully functioning around the plant’s vascular systems, according to Live Science. For ten years, Stavrinidou and her classmates have attempted to make electronic plants. The team picked rose shrubs due to the plants accessibility and distinctive root system, and because rose bushes have petioles, bark and leaves.
Initial Experiments Didn’t Allow for Proper Growth
A few of their past experiments required the cyborg roses to release hazardous compounds that infected the plant itself and avoided the xylem to efficiently deliver water throughout the rose bush. Stavrinidou then determined to reduce rose stems and placed them in a solution which contained a variation of a organic polymers labelled PEDOT-S: H for approximately 2 days. After the soaking process, the group was happily surprised to find that little wires of PEDOT-S: H had made a circuit within the stems of the cyborg roses.
Plants With Digital Circuits Can Be Developed
The team right away recognized the potential for plants with digital circuits once the peeled off external layers of the cyborg rose bark displayed the 2-inch wires of the organic polymer that is capable of electrical conduction when kept hydrated. Co-author as well as organic electronics researcher Magnus Berggren, from Linkoping College in Sweden, shared that the cyborg roses themselves had assisted in placing the electronic devices. Since then, the group has actually created self-assembling transistors that are essential for developing sensor networks.
Cyborg Roses Could Even Bloom in the Desert
In the future, the researchers hope that their work would enable flowers to bloom at the best and worst climate problems, arid or cold. Electronic sensors and genetic engineering could work together for the improvement of plant productivity.
In addition, electrical sensors could replace genetically modified plants that could pose negative repercussions to the environment because a few of the modifications made are long-term. The breakthrough conclusions of the group were reported on the journal Science Advances.
