Controlling plant growth with light. Free Technical Library News

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Plant Growth Control with Light

04.07.2020

Scientists from Germany and the UK have found a way to control various plant processes - such as growth - using optogenetics. By exposing different colors of light, scientists can turn different plant genes on and off.

Previously, it was not possible to use optogenetics in research with plants because plants naturally respond to light as they grow. Therefore, any genetic switches controlled by light, one way or another, remained permanently active.

Experts have found a way to deal with this problem. They developed a special system PULSE (Plant Usable Light-Switch Elements), which allows you to control various cellular processes in plants using light. The project links two current topics in biology - optogenetics and synthetic biology.

Thanks to the new tools, it is now possible to use, for example, red light to trigger gene expression at a certain point, while ambient white light can be used as a "switch" to reverse the process. In this case, the procedure can be repeated any number of times. This process is non-invasive and easily reversible - unlike the use of chemicals or drugs.

Scientists can use this system to control the physiological responses in plants: their immune response and possibly their development, growth, hormone transmission, and stress responses.

The researchers hope that in the future their technology will allow them to regulate how plants grow and how they flower and adapt to their environment, ultimately increasing yields.

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Random news from the Archive

The thermal conductivity of copper is improved 25.03.2014

A group of scientists, including Alexander Balandin from the University of California at Riverside and Konstantin Novoselov from the University of Manchester in the UK, published the results of an innovative way to increase the thermal conductivity of copper in the journal Nano Letters.

Copper is one of the main components of any chip. The thinnest copper conductors inside the chip connect millions of transistors to each other. In a modern processor, the total length of such conductors reaches 50-60 km. When passing through the conductors of electric current, they heat up, releasing heat, which must be removed.

In 2001, Pat Gelsinger stated that if the amount of heat generated by processors continues to grow at current rates, then by 2005 a single chip will produce as much energy as a nuclear reactor, and by 2015 - as much heat is emitted by the Sun (Gelsinger worked for 30 years at Intel, taking part in the development of the design of all the first processors of the corporation).

However, Gelsinger's prediction did not materialize. Engineers have found a way to curb heat generation while further increasing performance by lowering the clock speed and equipping processors with multiple cores running simultaneously.

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In order to solve this problem, the scientists in their experiment used a sandwich-like composite material in which a layer of copper was coated on both sides with layers of graphene. This made it possible to improve the heat dissipation of the copper conductor by 25%.

According to Balandin, graphene itself does not have any heat sink properties. The movement of thermal energy in a metal, as a rule, is hindered by its crystal structure. When applied to copper, graphene changes this structure, allowing energy to move more freely, the scientist explained.

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