BIONIC PLANT : This Arabidopsis plant with carbon nanotubes inside its leaves has augmented light energy capture. Life organell...
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| BIONIC PLANT: This Arabidopsis plant with carbon nanotubes inside its leaves has augmented light energy capture. |
Life organelle of plant, the chloroplast are tiny units of photosynthesis. These organelles use solar energy to split water molecules and form the high energy hydrocarbons, with the release of oxygen, which is made available through stomata to the external environment.
However, the functionality of chloroplasts is low as it uses only 10% of the incoming light. Therefore to boost energy usage and lower the entropy of the system, a team of chemical engineers and biochemists in MIT, USA, performed a study, which they published in "Nature Materials".
A chemical engineer Juan Pablo Giraldo at MIT said that Plants have given us a variety of products and now we can use their potential to boost solar energy production and other processes.
The researchers removed chloroplast from spinach leaves and inserted Carbon Nano Tube into it. This process was elicited due to charge differences and the entry of CNTs in Chloroplast is irreversible and is complete. And most importantly, it also doesn't hurt the life of plant leaves for some weeks. The process is also tested on living plant leaves of Arabidopsis thaliana. The process can be useful in delivering compounds to the cells using nanotubes, as researchers also used it to carry ceria, a nanoparticle combo of cerium and oxygen in chloroplasts, which functioned effectively to remove excess oxygen that was hampering the cellular mechanisms in leaves reducing the efficiency.
The research showed quite good results as after six hours of entry CNTs, chloroplast showed 3 times enhanced photosynthesis. The CNTs helped the chloroplast system in enhancing the use of light energy for electron transport, however the effect of these CNTs on products of the ultimate process is unknown.
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