Spinach plants modified to detect explosives

The development from a team at MIT is said to be one of the first demonstrations of engineering electronic systems into plants, an approach dubbed plant nanobionics.

"The goal of plant nanobionics is to introduce nanoparticles into the plant to give it non-native functions," said Michael Strano, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT and the leader of the research team. Strano is the senior author of a paper describing the nanobionic plants in Nature Materials. The paper's lead author is Min Hao Wong, an MIT graduate student who has started a company called Plantea to further develop this technology.

The plants were designed to detect nitroaromatics, which are often used in landmines and other explosives. When one of these chemicals is present in the groundwater sampled naturally by the plant, carbon nanotubes embedded in the plant leaves emit a fluorescent signal that can be read with an infrared camera. The camera can be attached to a small computer similar to a smartphone, which then sends an email to the user.