On this site I have repeatedly mentioned the efforts of many companies to create meat in the laboratory (already 3 years ago), or milk: even honey. Processes that, at least according to their creators, consume fewer resources and have a lower environmental impact.
MIT researchers will soon publish a paper describing a proof of concept of lab-grown plant tissues, such as wood and fiber, using a similar approach. The research is in its infancy, but it's a great vision. The idea is to avoid billions of trees being cut down, and to "grow" biomaterials rather than tear them from the planet.
To make a table you need wood. To make wood in the laboratory, no trees felled
Consider a normal wooden table. Over the years, one or more trees have converted sunlight, minerals and water into leaves, wood, bark and seeds. Once they reached a certain size, they became felled trees and were transported to a sawmill to be turned into lumber. The lumber was then transported to a factory or carpentry shop where it was cut, shaped and assembled. How many trees cut down!
Now imagine that the entire process happens at the same time and in the same place.
A wood grown in the laboratory, without felled trees, only with the fibers that are needed at the moment (without seeds, leaves, bark or roots). A wood that can be manipulated in advance to have desired properties, and molded directly into shapes: for example a kitchen table. Stop for "native" wood, green light for laboratory "grown" wood in the laboratory.
Wood in the laboratory: little waste, little pollution. Zero trees felled.
Obviously, the technique would not be limited to one table. Other products could be made, with other biomaterials. In theory, and on a large scale, the process would be more efficient, less expensive and would save many forests. The farewell to the felled trees would be global.
This is the vision. But first, researchers need to figure out if it's even feasible.
The study's lead author is a doctoral student in mechanical engineering at MIT. Her name is Ashley Beckwith.
Ashley says she was inspired by her time on a farm: from an engineer's perspective, a world full of inefficiency.
He's right. After all, time and seasons are beyond our control. We use the land and resources to grow whole plants, but we only use bits of them for food or materials. Billions of trees felled with a gigantic dispersion.
“This got me thinking: Can we be more strategic about what we're getting out of this process? Can we get more yield?” says Beckwith in an MIT release on the research.
I wanted to find a more efficient way to use land and resources so that we could let more arable land remain wild, or to maintain lower production but allow for greater biodiversity.
Ashley Beckwith, M.I.T.
To make a table (wooden in the laboratory) you need a flower
To test the idea, the team took cells from the leaves of a zinnia plant and fed them with a liquid growth medium. After the cells grew and divided, the researchers placed them in a gel “mold” and soaked the cells in hormones.
You may be wondering what zinnia cells, which are a small flowering plant, have to do with wood and felled trees.
Well, as mentioned, their properties can be "adjusted" like stem cells to express the desired attributes. The hormones auxin and cytokinin caused the zinnia cells to produce lignin, the polymer that makes wood solid.
By tuning their hormone knobs, the team was able to regulate lignin production. The gel "mold", a real structure, then induced the cells to grow in a particular shape.
Furniture to grow
“The idea is not only to adapt the properties of the material, but also to adapt its shape from conception,” he says Luis Fernando Velásquez-García, co-author of the paper with Ashley Beckwith.
Velásquez-García's lab works with 3D printing technology and sees the new technique as a kind of additive manufacturing, where each cell is a printer and the gel scaffold directs their production.
Although it's still early days, the team believes this study demonstrates that plant cells can be manipulated to produce a biomaterial with properties suitable for a specific use.
Obviously a lot more work is needed to take the idea beyond proof of concept.
Things grow
The researchers now need to figure out whether what they've learned can be adapted to other cell types. “Hormone knobs” may differ from species to species.
Additionally, scaling up solves the problem of downed trees, but requires solving problems such as maintaining healthy gas exchange between cells.
All normal. Early research answers the fundamental question: is this idea worth investigating? Key questions such as cost and scalability are often left unanswered at this stage.
It also happened with meat
The first experiments with lab-grown meat, for example, were incredibly expensive and lacking key properties. The first lab-grown hamburger famously cost a few hundred thousand dollars but lacked the fat (tasty) chunks of a traditional ground beef burger. It wasn't ready in terms of cost or quality.
In the following years, investments and interest grew and costs decreased. Now it's not so ridiculous to imagine lab-grown meat in your local grocery store or restaurant. Just last year, Singapore became the first country to approve lab-grown meat for commercial consumption.
Bioengineering and production, roads destined to meet
Whether this particular vision of wood without felled trees garners support or not, seeing cells as miniature factories is nothing new.
Increasingly, the worlds of bioengineering and manufacturing meet. Engineered cells are already being put to work in industrial contexts.
Last fall, a Japanese clothing brand offered a limited edition (and extremely expensive) sweater made with 30% fiber produced by genetically modified bacteria grown in a bioreactor.
