Iron Man plants are supercharged by nanotech power

The story of Iron Man, in which a man gains spectacular abilities by infusing his body with technology, is still just fantasy. But the first Iron Plants have been made.

A team of biologists and engineers has made bionic plants that have been upgraded with an injection of nanotechnology.

The idea is two-fold: to boost plants' ability to photosynthesise, and to produce a new class of bionic materials that grow and repair themselves using little more than sunlight. But the results have been received with a mixture of amazement and scepticism, largely because the underlying mechanisms are something of a black box.

The team say they have persuaded nanomaterials to burrow deep into plant cells, reaching the tiny chloroplasts that make the plant's energy. Here the nanomaterials enhance this process, even allowing it to work outside the plant.

Applications remain far off, but could include self-powering and self-repairing phones or even buildings; trees that double as cellphone towers; and a new type of fuel cell. "The vision is to use plants as a platform for technology," says team leader Michael Strano of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"This is awesome," says Andrew Adamatzky of the University of the West of England in Bristol, UK. "The research uncovers novel ways to hybridise hardware and wetware and to assemble, in principle, nano-circuits inside plants' living cells."

"This is a marvellous demonstration of how nanotechnology can be coupled with synthetic biology to modify and enhance the function of living organisms," says synthetic biologist James Collins of Boston University. "The authors show that self-assembling nanoparticles can be used to enhance the photosynthetic capacity of plants." Others contacted by New Scientist were sceptical, demanding to understand how the enhanced photosynthesis works.