![]() ![]() STRANO’S LIGHT-EMITTING PLANT is among the latest iterations of a scientific endeavor that began in the 1980s when a team at the University of California, San Diego modified a tobacco plant to give off light. Strano is currently working on multiple plant nanobionics initiatives, from plants that can detect explosives to those that can communicate with cell phones. Plant nanobionics is a developing field and thus still quite small indeed, most of its researchers are Strano’s former students. The light-emitting plant project is a part of a broader, relatively new niche of research within nanotechnology that Strano calls “plant nanobionics.” Nano refers to science at a nanoscale (specifically, between 1 and 100 nanometers, a nanometer measuring one billionth of a meter), and bionics refers to functions typically performed by electronic devices. He hopes someday plants might glow brightly enough to illuminate a room and diminish the need for other types of indoor lighting. Strano says the next generation of plants will glow more brightly and for substantially longer than a few hours. The prototype glowed for 3.5 hours with a yellowish-green light about one-thousandth the amount needed for reading, though one of the project’s trademark photos shows a three-week-old watercress plant faintly illuminating the pages of Paradise Lost. In December 2017, the Strano Research Group at MIT published a paper in the journal Nano Letters about how it modified four plant species - spinach, arugula, kale, and watercress - to emit light. I watch the emails accumulate as we chat about one of his current projects: making plants glow. On the wall, a projector displays a web page opened to his email account. He’s wearing a light pink, button-down shirt and sports a salt-and-pepper beard. As I enter his office, Strano mistakes me for a prospective graduate student. I’m here to meet with professor and chemical engineer Michael Strano. ![]() Yellow doors line the left side of the hallway, accompanied by threatening signs that read “CAUTION: Eye Protection Required” and “Danger Invisible Laser Radiation.” On the other side of the hall is ordinary office space - a compelling dual-brain analogy in the form of interior design. On a sunny March morning, I take the elevator to the fifth floor and enter the department confidently, hoping to give off the look of an engineering student. THE MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY (MIT) Department of Chemical Engineering is located in a triangular-shaped building, one of four structures on campus designed by world-renowned architect I.M. Yet, for all this diversity, there are no known plants that emit light - or at least, there haven’t been until recently. Also on the list are Antarctic krill, land snails, and jellyfish. There’s the three-inch firefly squid that illuminates Japanese tides, and there’s foxfire, light emitted by some fungi that grow on dying wood. In some warm parts of the world, the bioluminescent plankton Noctiluca scintillans are so concentrated that entire swaths of ocean glow. Many deep-sea fish have evolved to be nightlights in the dark. Part of that captivation probably stems from the fact that only a limited number of living things emit light. Generation after generation we continue to chase fireflies. We travel north to catch a glimpse of Aurora Borealis. There’s something magical and universally captivating about the ability to produce light. But we watched them with a common interest, fascinated by the light twinkling from their bodies. Years later I would catch fireflies in my grandfather’s backyard and gaze at them through a jar. Their bioluminescent guts made the window glow. WHEN MY GRANDFATHER was young, he caught fireflies and smeared their abdomens on the window pane.
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