Stalk exchange: In labs, flowers are being turned into climate warriors, space snacks
The world’s tiniest bloom is headed for new frontiers. A rose may store electricity. Check out the latest in cutting-edge floral research from around the world.
What else can a flower be?
In cutting-edge labs around the world, scientists are turning petals into power sources, tiny blooms into space snacks, and daffodils into climate warriors.
The aquatic space snack
Watermeal, the tiniest flowering plant in the world, could potentially power breakfast (as well as lunch, dinner, and tea-time snacks) for future space travellers.
This plant grows to full capacity in a few days. It is high in protein, vitamins and antioxidants. Each bloom is about the size of a grain of sand.
Because the plant grows so fast, it absorbs more carbon dioxide and releases vast quantities of oxygen (relative to its size). In this way, it could help clear the air on voyaging vessels too.
In 2023, scientists from Mahidol University in Thailand tested if this rootless, stemless flowering plant, which grows in clumps on the surfaces of lakes and ponds, could survive the effects of hyper gravity — about 20 times more powerful than Earth’s. It turns out the hardy flecks can. (Crucial because everything on a spaceship must endure at least two bouts of hyper gravity — one during launch from Earth and the other upon re-entry into an atmosphere.)
Watermeal already fuels an array of Thai dishes. With a texture akin to caviar, it is used as a garnish on steamed eggs, clear soups and salads.
“The reason we became interested in it is because it is so fast-growing, rich in protein, and easy to harvest. The entire plant can be eaten,” says Tatpong Tulyananda, principal investigator at the Space Biology and Astrobotany Laboratory at Mahidol University.
He and his team began researching watermeal as a possible spacefarer in 2018. At the time, they were looking to model how plants respond to changing gravity levels. “Because watermeal is rootless, stemless and doesn’t have leaves, it’s like a sphere floating about on water. So, we could focus directly on the effects that gravity shifts would have on its growth and development,” he says.
His team has been collaborating with the European Space Agency (ESA) on this research since 2023.
Having established that the plant can survive, and keep growing, in hyper gravity and amid high radiation levels, they are now studying how nutrient composition might change in such conditions. “We plan to send samples to space in the next phase of our research,” Tulyananda says. “We think watermeal might become an essential, sustainable source of food and oxygen, as we build habitations on the Moon, with an eye on Mars.”
Climate warriors
The daffodil, that bloom beloved of Romantic poets, is in a different kind of dance today: to potentially reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Scientists at the Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC) have found that a chemical extracted from the trumpet-shaped blossoms can reduce the production of methane by livestock by as much as 30%, when added to feed.
Methane is a particularly problematic greenhouse gas, absorbing far more energy than carbon dioxide, for instance, and responsible for an estimated 30% of the current rise in global temperatures, according to data from the intergovernmental think-tank International Energy Agency.
Livestock emissions account for about 32% of human-caused methane emissions, according to a 2021 assessment by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
In 2023, researchers at SRUC started working on a project to reduce cattle methane emissions using a chemical called haemanthamine, extracted from daffodils. It does this by inhibiting the microbes in cow stomachs that help produce methane as a byproduct of digestion.
On-farm tests are now being conducted as part of the Dancing with Daffodils project, an initiative of the Scotland Department for Environmental Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA).
A rose to send sparks flying
Talk about chemistry.
At Linköping University in Sweden, researchers are tinkering with rose petals in ways that could make them storers and conductors of electricity.
Because the vascular system of plants transmits chemical signals much like an electronic circuit does (or, indeed, the neurons in the brain), researchers have been able to use cut roses to conduct (very small amounts of) electricity.
A wide array of plants have such vascular systems, and so the experiment could potentially work with other plants too, the researchers have said.
The experiments are being led by Eleni Stavrinidou, a senior associate professor of organic electronics at Linköping University.
Since 2017, she and her team have been rigging the vascular system of store-bought roses by essentially placing the cut ends in a polymer-based chemical solution. On being absorbed, the polymerised solution acts as an electrical wire flowing through the rose’s vascular tissue.
When the team administered voltage using conducting wires and supercapacitors along the stem, the vascular structures or xylem was able to conduct that electricity through the flower.
ePlants, or plants with integrated electronics, have been a niche area of research for years, but most experiments involve embedding devices and circuits in certain parts of a plant. Here, Stavrinidou was able to use a standard research-grade chemical to turn the existing plant structure into an electronic conductor.
While the most charge they were able to store in the vascular tissue of the rose was 0.65 mC (milliCoulombs) — not enough to power daily-use electronics (a typical smartphone battery needs about 1.08 million mC in order to run) — the ability to store energy opens up “pathways for autonomous energy systems, distributed electronics, and new ePlant device concepts manufactured in living plants,” the researchers note, in a paper published in the journal Applied Physical Sciences.
In the next phase of experimentation, they plan to try to use the electrical impulses to alter the growth patterns of the plant itself.
