Although wood is a renewable resource, it is being depleted very quickly and thousands of hectares are deforested each year. In other words, humanity is losing this resource so fast that it has no time to recover.

Just imagine – the total forest area in the world is falling to the size of Iceland every year – having a very negative impact on both wildlife and climate.

To solve this problem, a team of scientists from MIT demonstrated a technology in the lab that allowed them to create a very wood-like material from plant cells. At the same time, they learned to manage both their intensity and strength to some extent.

The idea of ​​scientists is to create products with a certain shape without the need for further processing, with the inevitable consumption of energy and the appearance of industrial waste. According to Ashley Beckwith, lead author of the study, there is a great resource for scaling technology and magnifying three-dimensional structures.

What a new miracle material

First, the scientists took the cells of the zinnia plant (Zinnia elegans), then placed them in a liquid medium for two days and then made them into a special, thicker biogel containing nutrients and two types of phytohormones – changing their content, changing the physical and mechanical properties of the future material. checks.

After that, the team started to print about the same 3D printing with the help of biogel figures in various shapes. After three months of incubation in the dark, the material was dried and the final result was a woody substance object. In one of the tests, the scientists even managed to create a tree model from the material.

Small Iodine Printed From Biogel / EPFL Photo

Experiments were carried out with different levels of phytohormones – their reduced level led to a lower density, and its increase allowed to form more rigid structures. In the future such experiments will create lighter and softer or harder objects.

The ultimate goal is to develop technology that allows you to simply print things and wooden furniture without destroying the actual forest. It may be possible to start with small objects, such as decorative figures, and then use this to make chairs or, for example, building frames and boards.

In the next step, scientists plan to find a way to use other plants as the basis of cells. Zinnia is not a tree, but in the long run you can base something like pine cells – it could be a real scientific breakthrough.