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Cyborg Rose: Living Plant Tissue Used To Build Components Of Electronic Circuits

By Alap Naik Desai
Published on: 20:49 PST, Nov 20, 2015

A ‘Cyborg Rose’ with an electronic circuitry embedded in its vascular system has been successfully created. This breakthrough could allow creation of electronics that have perfect synergy with living biological systems.

Researchers at Linköping University in Sweden have managed to seamlessly merge electronic circuitry with the vascular system of living plants. For their first ever attempt, scientists have created a kind of cyborg flower – a rose which has micro-electronic circuits embedded through its vascular system, allowing scientists to send and receive electrical and electronic signals and have an elemental, but functional device that offers basic functions of an electronic circuit.

The team of researchers from the Laboratory of Organic Electronics at Linköping University in Sweden managed to find a new use for cut roses turning them into rudimentary cyborgs. The team published the research in the journal Science Advances. Besides offering pleasing aesthetics and aroma, these stemmed roses readily infused electronic circuits within them, said Magnus Berggren, lead author of the research,

“In a sense, the plant is helping to organize the electronic devices.”

Though cyborg cockroaches and humans with electronics implanted in them are common today, marrying electronics with plants is quite new, but offers tremendous promise, continued Berggren,

“Now we can really start talking about ‘power plants’ – we can place sensors in plants and use the energy formed in the chlorophyll, produce green antennas, or produce new materials. Everything occurs naturally, and we use the plants’ own very advanced, unique systems.”

The university has been working on embedding electronics in plants for more than 20 years, and had attempted to get trees to accept electronic circuitry in the 1990s, but lack of funding halted the project midway, reported Popular Science. However, now they scaled down their approach and managed to get cut roses to accept electronic circuitry via their vascular system.

To make ‘Cyborg Roses’, scientists needed to get circuits into the roses, without splicing them. Hence the roses needed to absorb a material that naturally builds the circuits inside. It is common knowledge roses absorb water when kept in a vase. Scientists decided to use this to their advantage and created a special material that travels up the roses’ stem and eventually build circuits relying on the vascular system of the flower to offer a circuit diagram or backbone.

The new material invented for this purpose is called PEDOT-S, which is an advanced low-viscosity polymer, which can be readily sucked in by the rose’s vascular system. Once the polymer was within the rose, it naturally formed “wires” inside the plant’s xylem. Thereafter all the scientists had to do was send electrical signals. The polymer didn’t interfere with the rose’s ability to get nutrients and water, ensuring the plant stayed healthy and functioning, which is, needless to say, critical for the success of an electronic circuitry within living plant tissue, enabling them to become cyborgs.

The scientists also had an added advantage of the biology’s need of electrolytes. Besides allowing any biological system to generate energy, these substances also carry an electrical charge. By connecting the ‘wires’ created by the polymer, relying on the electrolytes to transmit an electrical charge, scientists were able to create a rudimentary working transistor and a digital logic gate, the basic building block of any computer system, reported The Christian Science Monitor.

The ‘Cyborg Roses’, were then further tweaked with variants of the polymer that changed color. The end result was a rose with leaves that offered an elementary display. The polymer changed color as the electrical current varied.

The organic polymer PEDOT-S:H is chemically referred to as poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene), and was developed because it has good electrical conductivity when hydrated. When the roses that were infused with the polymer were carefully dissected, scientists found tiny wires of the organic polymer that had percolated up 2 inches (5 centimeters) into the stem through the vascular system of the rose, reported Live Science. Though quite basic, such bio-electronics will open up new frontiers for living electronics, hope scientists.

[Photo by Matt Cardy/Getty Images]

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