LEGO Bricks Turned Into Scientific Tool To Study Plant Growth b4in.org/i5Hw Ludovico Cademartiri had what seemed like an impossibly demanding list of requirements for his lab equipment. The Iowa State University assistant professor of materials science and engineering wants to understand environmental effects on plant growth, specifically how variations in climate and soil characteristics affect root growth. That requires highly controlled environments that expose whole plants to environmental effects such as nutrients, water, oxygen gradients as well as physical obstacles for the roots. Greenhouses can create fairly controlled environments for whole plants, but they’re homogeneous. And microfluidic technologies can create highly controlled micron-scale environments, but they’re expensive, relatively complex and not easy to scale up. Cademartiri was looking for a way to study plant and root growth that was simple, inexpensive and flexible, something that allowed experiments to be reproduced all over the world, even in labs without the latest technologies or the infrastructure required for plant science or agronomy research. He was looking for something modular, scalable and structurally precise. He wanted something simple, reproducible, affordable and capable of many simultaneous experiments. He was looking for something transparent, autoclavable, three-dimensional, chemically inert and compatible with existing plant growth experiments. And he thought of the perfect something from the toy aisle: LEGO bricks. “Forget for a minute that they’re used as toys,” Cademartiri said. “They’re actually pieces of high-quality plastic, built to extraordinary standards of precision, that you can use to build stuff.” They’re also “a good example of how something simple can solve a complex design problem,” he said. Cademartiri and his research group report their use of LEGO bricks to successfully build engineered environments for plant and root studies in a paper just published by the peer-reviewed, online journal PLOS ONE. More b4in.org/i5Hw
Posted on: Mon, 30 Jun 2014 06:19:32 +0000
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