Super Plants: Could Re-Wired Plants Be the New Cancer Killers? - US News and World Report
The chemical lab of the future could look like a farm, with thousands of plants naturally using photosynthesis to produce complex drugs, chemicals, and biofuels, according to a Danish research team.
Research published in the February 8 edition of Trends in Plant Science suggests the complex chemical reactions involved in photosynthesis could be rerouted to automatically produce mass quantities of rare, valuable medicines and complex chemicals that are artificially produced in chemical labs today.
“We’re talking about compounds such as morphine and chemicals used to treat cancer,” Birger Lindberg Møller, the lead researcher says. “It’d make our society bio-based and much more independent of oil,” because the energy to make these chemicals would come from the sun, not fossil fuels, he says. Chemicals that are dangerous, difficult and costly to make in a lab would be made naturally by the plants.
The idea of harnessing photosynthesis, a naturally occurring process that allows plants to turn sunlight and carbon dioxide into food, for human use isn’t new. In 2010, French scientists announced that they had transformed the chemical energy produced by photosynthesis into electrical energy. Photosynthesis is one of the most efficient energy-creating processes scientists have discovered, so, theoretically, great amounts of chemicals or electricity could be created with very little waste.