This Spinach Plant Can Actually Detect Explosives

This explosive sensing spinach plant

is a plant that can detect explosives in the ground water

and trigger nanoparticles in the leaves

that send an infrared signal to a user's cell phone.

If you think of all the things you would like to know

about your ground water, is there any arsenic?

Is there any mercury or lead?

Are there other harmful chemicals?

My name is Michael Strano, I'm the Carbon P. Dubbs

Professor of Chemical Engineering here at MIT,

I lead a research lab of about 25 people,

we work in the area of nanotechnology.

Nanobionics is the goal of using nanoparticles

to impart new functions into, in particular, plants.

How we made the explosive sensing plant

is we took two kinds of nanoparticles

that emit light in the infrared.

We'll take a nanoparticle solution

and we'll put it into a needle or syringe,

we'll pressurize that solution onto a leaf.

At that point the plant itself is rendered

an explosive sensing living plant.

If explosives are present in ground water,

the plant is naturally sampling the ground water

through the roots, it brings the water up through the stem

or the trunk of the tree, and it sends that water

to the leaves where we had our sensors implanted.

When the explosives interact with the particles

they emit this infrared light.

So we're still at the early stages

of having plants dynamically communicate

with your cell phone or detect chemicals,

but we've shown a number of things are possible.

If a user is nearby, they can use something

like a cell phone camera to intercept the signal.

What the user sees when they get the signal

that indicates the explosives,

right now we generate an image of the leaf

and we have simple software that can interpret

this image and tell you that there are explosives present.

It was important to us to show that you could take any,

what's called a wild type plant, or any plant

that you would encounter, you could walk up to it

and modify it in this way and it would be a living sensor.

It was important for us to show

that if you can do spinach, you can do any plant.

There may be applications to terrorism,

to monitoring public spaces, that's possible.

I think we're at the early stages of engineers

looking at a tree as what technology can we build

into a tree, how can trees help us to do some of the things

that have been harder or more expensive

or not as friendly for the environment as in the past.

I think you're going to be surprised

about what you can do with a living plant.

(dramatic music)