Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have made early progress in their attempts to create lab-grown wood. The team behind the initial work believe progress made in the early stages suggests they will one day be able to create wood and wooden products, without the need to grow, and fell, trees.
The first stages of the research also suggest the scientists will eventually be able to choose and control the shape the wood grows in. That would open the door to lab-grown wooden furniture like tables or chairs that develop as solid blocks of wood that don’t require any assembly.
Ashley Beckwith, the study’s lead author, hopes the team’s work will ultimately mean less wooded areas need to be felled to source wood. Deforested areas often make way for agricultural land, rather than tree populations being re-planted and allowed to recover.
Ms Beckwith, a PhD student in mechanical engineering, commented:
“By bringing some of the plant material production into the lab, we aim to alleviate some of the pressures that our current agricultural practices place on the environment”.
“These lab-based techniques also provide an opportunity to produce products locally, reducing the energy usage associated with the harvesting, transporting, and processing of whole crops as well as the shipping of final products.”
The research involved the team growing very small ‘wood-like’ structures from live zinnia leaf (part of the daisy family) cells. The extracted cells were placed in a liquid solution, in which they multiplied. They were then placed in a gel where the scientists were able to ‘tune’ the cells into what they wanted.
The gel serves as a kind of scaffold, providing a structure that the cells grow into. As the cells transform into wood-like cells, their structure solidifies in a tough, wood-like substance. The firmness is achieved through auxin and cytokinin, two plant hormones that control the amount of lignin, the substance that hardens wood, produced by cells.
In theory, the gel can be shaped like a final product, for example a table, with the cells multiplying and hardening into a wood-like structure in the desired shape. As Ms Beckwith says:
“So, yes, you could theoretically grow a table directly — fully assembled.”
The tiny wood-like structures of just a few centimetres the team have produced to-date, are a long way off the scale of the kind of wood products we use but producing larger objects is a next step. As is experimenting with cells from other kinds of plants.
Because only a part of a tree, its timber trunk, can be used for wooden structural elements, the rest, such as leaves, roots, bark and branches, are discarded. Often burnt. It also takes years to decades for a tree to grow to a size felling it produces a profitable volume of timber. Which means lab-grown wood, if the techniques the MIT researchers are exploring can be developed to a commercially viable level, would be far more efficient than traditional forestry.
The study’s co-author, Luis Fernando Velásquez-García, comments:
“We can envision it being a key technology for producing locally what is consumed — make what you need, when you need it. These goods would be made locally, used locally, and would be biodegradable.”
The study is published in the Journal of Cleaner Production.