Move Over, Internet of Things — the Strano Research Group Introduces the Internet of Plants
Modified spinach plants have been shown to act as sensors and even allow wireless data communication to a handheld smartphone.
The Strano Research Group of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is working on an interesting next level to the Internet of Things (IoT): the Internet of Plants — in particular, spinach plants.
Led by Professor Michael Strano, the Strano Research Group has been working for the past several years on turning living plants into "nanobionic" sensors by adding nanoparticles and creating a living network of internet-connected sensors offering everything from soil health monitoring to the detection of explosive materials.
"They’re not designed to be eaten," Strano explains of the modified plants in an interview with Fast Company. "We're making plants that essentially are hooked up to the internet. So they can experience the same environment, and they can detect and transduce all these signals, put them in electronic form."
The key piece of work on the topic was published back in October 2016 in the journal Nature Materials, in which researcher Min Hao Wong and colleagues demonstrated "living spinach plants (Spinacia oleracea) [which] can be engineered to serve as self-powered pre-concentrators and autosamplers of analytes in ambient groundwater and as infrared communication platforms that can send information to a smartphone.
"These results," the successful study concluded, "demonstrate the ability of living, wild-type plants to function as chemical monitors of groundwater and communication devices to external electronics at stand-off distances."
The Strano Research Group has also published work on using nanobionic sensors for arsenic level monitoring, explosives detection, and even demonstrations of how plants can be modified to emit light or provide power to solid-state electronics.
The paper on modified spinach sensors with infrared communications capabilities has been published under closed-access terms in the journal Nature Materials; additional information on that and other studies is available on the Strano Research Group website.