Plants Reveal Mechanical Traits - Could Be Useful For Bio-Material Production

Lorna Gibson, Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT, has put together some data regarding the microstructures of several plants, and has discovered that plants reveal a wide range of mechanical characteristics based on the grouping of the cell wall’s four main building blocks, namely - cellulose, hemicellulose, lignin and pectin. She believes that understanding plants' microscopic arrangements shall assist engineers to come up with innovative bio-materials. She states that various engineering materials have the same properties as plans, but as the plants's properties are just because of four basic constituents, some better designs on engineering materials could be worked upon.

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Gibson finds close resemblance in the plant's natural components and some man-made artificial substances, like cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin have similar strength and stiffness as produced polymers. Some plants' cell configuration, say apple, resembles industrial foam. The multi-functionality of plants interested Gibson, as they had to attend to a number of requirements at once. And the microstructure formulated by plants caters to all these requirements. So that opens up a huge sea of potential for development of multifunctional engineering materials inspired by plants, she added.

Gibson's paper is #-Link-Snipped-# in this month's Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

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