Engineers Created Light Emitting Plant that Can be Recharged 

The MIT engineers used nanoparticles and created a Light Emitting Plant that an can charge. Plants glow brightly after 10 mins of charging for several minutes, and they can be recharged repeatedly. These can produce light that is ten times brighter than the first generation of glowing plants that the research group reported in 2017.

Michael Strano, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT and the senior author of the new study, said that they wanted to create a Light Emitting Plant with particles that will absorb light, store some of it, and emit it gradually. This is a big step toward plant-based lighting.

Sheila Kennedy, a professor of architecture at MIT and an author of the paper who has worked with Strano’s group on plant-based lighting, said that producing ambient light with the renewable chemical energy of living plants is a bold idea. That represents a fundamental shift in how we think about living plants and electrical energy for lighting.These particles can also boost the light production of any other type of Light Emitting Plant, including those one developed in Strano’s lab. Those plants use nanoparticles containing the enzyme luciferase, which is found in fireflies, to produce light.

The researchers found that the light capacitor approach can work in many different plant species like basil, watercress, and tobacco. They also showed that they could illuminate the leaves of a plant called the Thailand elephant ear, which can be more than a foot wide, a size that could make the plants be used as an outdoor lighting source.