An emerging approach in bioengineering strives to enhance plant function by combining biology and nanotechnology. Last year, MIT’s Michael Strano, his postdoc Juan Pablo Giraldo, and their colleagues charted one path in that approach, which they call plant nanobionics, by infiltrating a plant’s chloroplasts with semiconducting carbon nanotubes to increase photosynthesis. Once inside the chloroplasts, the nanotubes self-assembled alongside the photosynthetic proteins there.1
Conveniently, the plant did most of the assembly work. To prompt a leaf of Arabidopsis thaliana—a plant in the mustard greens family—to take up carbon nanotubes, Strano’s team had only to push a nanotube-filled solution through the leaf surface. Thanks to nanotubes’ natural affinity to fats, the chloroplasts’ outer lipid envelope pulled them inside the organelles. Among other advantageous properties, nanotubes can absorb a broad spectral band of photons, and plant leaves coated with them were found to absorb in the near-IR, a band not...
