Chemists Create Bionic Leaf to Solve Global Food Crisis

Harvard University chemists will present the "bionic leaf" this week at the National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society, ACS. These bionic leaves can make fertilizer from bacteria, water, air and sunlight.

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Daniel Nocera leads a team of inventors who hope to combat hunger, and at the very least put a dent in the global food problem. The chemists plan to design artificial plants that can use available resources to increase crop yield.

While working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology six years ago, Nocera built an artificial leaf that mimicked the process of photosynthesis; with the capacity to power an entire house. Last June, he announced that the bionic leaf 2.0 is an improvement on his previous invention. He stated that this new leaf can create energy more efficiently than natural growing plants. “The fuels were just the first step,” Nocera said. “Getting to that point showed that you can have a renewable chemical synthesis platform. Now we are demonstrating the generality of it by having another type of bacteria take nitrogen out of the atmosphere to make fertilizer.”

This new system works by using a bacteria to make bioplastics from hydrogen and carbon dioxide, which it then stores as fuel. Once the bacteria is placed in soil, it pulls nitrogen from the air to create crop-fertilizing ammonia.

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“When you have a large centralized process and a massive infrastructure, you can easily make and deliver fertilizer,” Nocera said in a press release. “But if I said that now you’ve got to do it in a village in India onsite with dirty water — forget it. Poorer countries in the emerging world don’t always have the resources to do this. We should be thinking of a distributed system because that’s where it’s really needed.”

The global population is growing by about 83 million people each year, according to a 2015 report by the United Nations. Experts estimate 9.7 billion people would have walked the Earth by 2050, many of whom will live in poverty and without food security.

The team's five-crop cycles demonstrated that vegetables which were grown with the bionic leaf’s fertilizer weigh 150 percent more than control crops. Nocera and his team now hope to refine their system to allow small farmers in developing regions to create their own fertilizer.