What if your house plant could tell you your water isn’t safe?
What if your house plant could tell you your water isn’t safe? Scientists are closer to realizing this vision, having successfully engineered a plant to turn beet red in the presence of a banned, toxic pesticide.
To achieve this, UC Riverside researchers had to solve an engineering puzzle: how to enable a plant to sense and react to a chemical in the environment without damaging its ability to function normally in all other respects.
“The biggest piece here is we’ve created an environmental sensor without modifying the plant’s native metabolism,” said Ian Wheeldon, associate professor of chemical and environmental engineering at UCR. “Previously, the biosensor component would have messed up the plant’s ability to grow toward light or stop using water when stressed. This won’t.”
A new paper detailing the chemistry behind the achievement has been published in the journal Nature Chemical Biology. The engineering process begins with a protein called abscisic acid, or ABA, that helps plants acclimate to stressful changes in the environment.
Read more at University of California - Riverside
Image: Laboratory plants, normally green, turn red in the presence of a toxic pesticide. (Credit: Sean Cutler/UCR)
