According to Van Oers, the system is applicable to all plants that live in wet ground. Streetlights, she suggested, could be connected to trees to provide light in areas without an electrical grid.

Image via Living Lights.

“What is more beautiful than getting electricity from living plants?” says Marjolein Helder, Plant-e CEO. “Your environment is able to generate electricity while you are still able to enjoy nature.”

Glowing MIT logo printed on the leaf of an arugula plant. The mixture of nanoparticles was infused into the leaf using lab-designed syringe termination adaptors. The image is merged with the bright-field image and light emission in the dark. Photo,  Seon-Yeong Kwak, via MIT.

MIT’s Nanobiotic Lights
Engineers at MIT believe that “nanobionic plants” might one day replace some electrical lighting. While Living Light functions employing the principles of photosynthesis, the MIT researchers are producing four hours of dim light by embedding luciferase, an enzyme that gives fireflies their glow, into the leaves of the plants.

Plant as Desk Lamp
“The vision is to make a plant that will function as a desk lamp — a lamp that you don’t have to plug in. The light is ultimately powered by the energy metabolism of the plant itself,” says Michael Strano, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT and the senior author with lead author Seon-Yeong Kwak of the MIT study, which appears in the journal Nano Letters.

Luciferase acts on the molecule luciferin, causing it to emit light, while co-enzyme (another enzyme) assists in the process, removing a reaction byproduct that can inhibit luciferase activity. The team makes all nanoparticles from materials that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration deems “generally regarded as safe.”

Transform Trees Into Self-Powered Streetlights
Any type of plant or vegetable will do the trick. So far, they’ve generated light from a one 10-centimeter watercress seedling–emitting only about one-thousandth of the amount needed to read by–but the researchers believe that by further optimizing the amount and duration of the emitted light, such plants will one day be bright enough to illuminate a workspace, provide low-intensity indoor lighting, and transform trees into self-powered streetlights.

Bomb-Sniffing Spinach
Having previously designed plants that can detect explosives and communicate that information to a smartphone, as well as plants that can monitor drought conditions, the MIT researchers aim to engineer plants that can replace many of the functions currently performed by electrical devices.

Image via MIT.

“Plants can self-repair, they have their own energy, and they are already adapted to the outdoor environment,” According to Strano. “We think this is an idea whose time has come. It’s a perfect problem for plant nanobionics.”

This is all cool enough to make any un-illuminated houseplant or kitchen greens wilt from jealousy.

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H/T Materia.