Could Lab-Grown Wood Be The Future Of Furniture?
Humans may soon be able to print entire pieces of furniture from lab-grown wood.
A group of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has developed a way to grow wood in a manner that eliminates the need to cut trees and minimizes the wastage from shaping the material.
This means that with their technique, if you need a wooden chair, you can “grow” a wooden chair, without needing to cut the wood, shape, or plane, and build it into a chair.
“The idea is that you can grow these plant materials in exactly the shape that you need, so you don’t need to do any subtractive manufacturing after the fact, which reduces the amount of energy and waste. There is a lot of potential to expand this and grow three-dimensional structures,” said lead author Ashley Beckwith, a recent Ph.D. graduate, in a May news release from MIT.
Beckwith is joined by Luis Fernando Velásquez-García, a principal scientist in MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories, and Jeffrey Borenstein, a biomedical engineer and group leader at the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory.
The lab-grown wood, which the researchers call “wood-like plant material” is crafted from the cells from the leaves of the flowering plant Zinnia elegans, more commonly known as zinnia. What they do is culture these cells first in a liquid medium and then in a gel-based medium that contains nutrients and two different hormones.
Researchers are able to determine the physical characteristics of the wood — like its density, stiffness, and strength — by tweaking the hormone concentration in the gel solution.
“In the human body, you have hormones that determine how your cells develop and how certain traits emerge. In the same way, by changing the hormone concentrations in the nutrient broth, the plant cells respond differently. Just by manipulating these tiny chemical quantities, we can elicit pretty dramatic changes in terms of the physical outcomes,” explained Beckwith.
The process isn’t instantaneous like 3D printing and could take months as the cell culture needs to still be incubated and dehydrated after being extruded into the specific shape needed, but it’s exponentially faster than actually growing a tree.
The technology doesn’t only offer hope for the future of trees but also opens up a forest of potential use cases. It would enable researchers to “grow wood products with the exact features needed for a particular application, like high strength to support the walls of a house or certain thermal properties to more efficiently heat a room.”
To further develop new techniques in plant-cell cultivation, Beckwith recently founded Foray Bioscience. She and her team intend to transfer the method to species of trees like pine and be able to print timber in a lab and maybe find a way to eliminate the need to cut trees in the future.
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