“If you want a table, then you should just grow a table,” Luis Fernando Velásquez-García, a principal scientist in MIT’s Microsystem’s technology laboratories, tells MIT News. “The way we get these materials hasn’t changed in centuries and is very inefficient,” he adds. “This is a real chance to bypass all that inefficiency.” The first cells used were extracted from Zinnia leaves and cultured in growth media. They were then “tuned” with hormones to produce the desired tissue, in this case lignin.
PhD student Ashley Beckwith, the lead author, says the idea came after she spent time on a farm and saw the inefficiencies in agriculture, such as weather impacts, fertilizers ending up off the field, and the amount of plant material that goes unused. “That got me thinking: Can we be more strategic about what we’re getting out of our process? Can we get more yield for our inputs?” Beckwith says. “I wanted to find a more efficient way to use land and resources so that we could let more arable areas remain wild, or to remain lower production but allow for greater biodiversity.”
The paper will be published in an upcoming issue Journal of Cleaner Production.