MIT scientists produce lab-grown customisable wood as solution for deforestation issue

In order to eradicate the problem of deforestation, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a technique to generate wood-like plant material in a lab. Estimates suggest that our planet loses about 10 million hectares of forest to deforestation each year, a rate which could wipe out the forests in the next 100 to 200 years.

This method would provide an environment-friendly and low-waste alternative and enable the growth of wooden products without the need to chop down trees, the scientists say in their study published in the journal Materials Today. 

Lead author Ashley Beckwith said in a report by MIT, "The idea is that you can grow these plant materials in exactly the shape that you need, so you don’t need to do any subtractive manufacturing after the fact, which reduces the amount of energy and waste. There is a lot of potential to expand this and grow three-dimensional structures."

How was the artificial wood produced?

The MIT experts started by isolating cells from the leaves of, Zinnia elegans, also called the common Zinnia plant. In the next step, these cells were cultured in a liquid medium for two days and were transferred to a gel-based medium containing nutrients and two hormones. It is at this stage that scientists are able to tune the physical and mechanical properties of the plant cells growing in the nutrient medium by adjusting the hormone levels. 

"In the human body, you have hormones that determine how your cells develop and how certain traits emerge. In the same way, by changing the hormone concentrations in the nutrient broth, the plant cells respond differently", Beckwith said. "Just by manipulating these tiny chemical quantities, we can elicit pretty dramatic changes in terms of the physical outcomes".

Furthermore, the experts use a 3D printer to convert the cultured gel solution into any structure of their choice and let it incubate in the dark for three months in a petri dish. 

During the experiments, the experts found that lower the hormone levels, the more rounded and open-cell plant materials they obtained. Besides, the plants also had lower density as opposed to higher hormone levels which led to the growth of plant materials with smaller, denser cell structures. 

Jeffrey Borenstein, another contributor to the study said, "This work demonstrates the power that a technology at the interface between engineering and biology can bring to bear on an environmental challenge, leveraging advances originally developed for health care applications."