CAMBRIDGE, Usa, oct. 31, 2016.- The spinach was always considered a source of vitamins and iron, but up to now nobody had considered as an ally in the detection of explosives. However, american scientists provided spinach of nanoparticles so that the vegetables can detect explosives in groundwater.
The team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, in the united States, placed tiny tubes of carbon in the leaves. When the spinach absorbed nitroaromatic explosives in water, the carbon reacted, and the leaves emitted a bit after fluorescent signals. These can in turn be captured by an infrared camera and be broadcast, such as an e-mail.
“This is a new demonstration that we can overcome the gap of communication between plants and people,” said one of the study’s authors, professor Michael Strano, on this technique. “Can be used in any living plant,” he added. Currently can read the signs light up from a metre away and working at greater distances, the researchers reported in the latest edition of the specialized magazine “Nature Materials”.
For the arrangement of the plants of spinach, fluorescent also can accurately calculate where to find the explosives, said the author Min Hao Wong to dpa.
Use spinach as a sensor of explosives is just one of the many possibilities of implementation of this technique which consists in placing the nanotubes in the mesophyll tissue of the leaves. In this layer between the epidermis of the beam and the underside of the leaves produce photosynthesis.
“The tools nanobiónicas can also be employed to detect signs of plants from their environment in vivo (in living organism), said Min Hao Wong. Bacterial infections, environmental stress, droughts, all these can be detected early and with high sensitivity by the plants. “Now we are just at the surface of all that can enable the nanobiónica in plants”, he added.
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