max facts
(Literally) Turning Spinach into Muscle
Remember how spinach helped Popeye’s muscles grow? Well, now a team of
Worcester Polytechnic Institute scientists have used the dark leafy green to grow
tissue for human hearts. First, they used chemicals to eat away the spinach’s cells
in a process call decellularization. This left behind the plant’s “skeleton,” a tough
cellulose vasculature complete with a network of veins originally used to shuttle
around nutrients. They then used the empty spinach veins as blood vessels, filling
them with human heart cells. A steady IV drip of blood through the vegetable veins
kept the heart cells alive as if they were hooked up to a living organism. Though more
research is needed, heart tissue grown on spinach could, in theory, be transplanted into
a body as cellulose isn’t toxic to humans and the spinach blood vessels could possibly be
coaxed into joining with a human body’s existing vascular system.
- inverse.com
Indoor Growing Bringing Back Failed Varieties
Indoor growing with LEDs is allowing salad breeders to bring back high-performing varieties that didn’t have strong
enough disease resistance in crop trials, a city farming expert has revealed. Indoor growing at facilities such as GrowUp
Urban Farms in London has allowed plant breeder Rijk Zwaan to reinstate certain salad varieties and boost product quality
and consistency, says Philips’ program manager for city farming, Roel Jansson. “Growing in indoor climate cells means
there are no pests, no weather changes, no bugs,” he says. “Everything that was developed by Rijk Zwaan in previous years
but maybe didn’t have enough disease resistance can be used indoors because here we don’t have disease. We can get
better taste, better coloration, faster growth.” Philips has a program with Dutch company Rijk Zwaan to screen different
varieties to find out which are best for indoor growing and which LED light spectrum they respond best to.
- fruitnet.com
Plant Inner Workings Help Make More Nutritious Crops
Almost every calorie that we eat at one time went through the veins of a plant. If a
plant’s circulatory system could be rejiggered to make more nutrients available—
through bigger seeds or sweeter tomatoes—the world’s farmers could feed more
people. Washington State University researchers have taken a major step in that
direction by unveiling the way a plant’s nutrients get from the leaves, where they are
produced through photosynthesis, to “sinks” that can include the fruits and seeds we
eat, and the branches we process for biofuels. The researchers found a unique and
critical structure where the nutrients are off-loaded, giving science
a new focal point in efforts to improve plant efficiency and
productivity. “If you can increase the sink strength by five per
cent, and you get five per cent more product, you’d be looking
at a multibillion dollar market,” says Michael Knoblauch,
professor in the WSU School of Biological Sciences.
- news.wsu.edu
26
tapped in