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Breaking: Art Student Makes Synthetic Leaf, Solves Everything

By Kat Bauman - August 1, 2014

in Materials

Ask your doctor if Silk Leaf is right for you

Stop the Green Dream presses. Julian Melchiorri has built a leaf that absorbs CO2 and sunlight and produces oxygen. Rather than just growing a plant like most of us who want leaves in our lives, Melchiorri's work got positively semi-scientific. By breaking down the tough proteins in silk, and plucking out useful chloroplasts from plant matter, the end product "lives" on light and water, and produces what we breathe. Produced as a part of the Royal College of Art course "Innovation Design Engineering," the Silk Leaf project was conceived as a way to manage emissions and neutralize environmental impact with a space efficient, "biological" material.

The Silk Leaf is a very thin membrane of silk protein, covered with a solution of chloroplast, resulting in a very thin, flat, seaweed-looking material. Lightweight, flexible, and made from growable materials, it sounds like a cool class project if nothing else. It's unclear whether the use of silk and the apparent destruction of living plants would be hurdles barring further development. Silk isn't exactly known for its affordability, and there's no explicit description available of the chloroplast extraction process. However, high tensile protein production has been investigated before (remember the Spider Goats?) and overall the idea is a good one with interesting potential applications.

Molecules! Gloves! Science!

Melchiorri suggests the material could be used on the outside of buildings as a city air scrubber. He also thinks these breathing "leaves" could be used within closed systems, like space ships or stations, where keeping the air supply balanced and breathable requires mechanically intensive processes. As he helpfully points out, "Plants don't grow in zero gravity." Nope, they sure don't... unless they're happily growing on the ISS.

Yum!

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Robert DeLanghe

9 years ago

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Really cool tech.. But plants can grow in zero g. Last week astronauts ate romaine lettuce they grew aboard the ISS.

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Luke

10 years ago

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@Mathieu

The overwhelming majority of our oxygen comes from cyanobacteria in the ocean. Trees don't do all that much.

Moreover, if you consider the resources involved in producing these artificial leaves, it's more economical and sustainable to simply plant a few trees. That way, you're growing leaves, not harvesting them, pulping them, and mixing their extract with silkworm silk, which itself needs a lot of feeding and coddling to produce.

But that's all moot, considering none of this is likely to work anyway.
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Mathieu

10 years ago

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In reply to Matt. It does actually take quite a bit of time to grow a tree and in this day and age where deforestation is harvesting trees faster than we replace them an invention like this is a more efficient (time wise) way of replacing the oxygen production we lose in the trees we chop down.
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Matt

10 years ago

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I'm a bit skeptical, but really, even if it does work, what's the point? Why not just plant a real tree? It doesn't take that much to grow one, and when it gets old you have some really nice useful wood to harvest too....
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Luke

10 years ago

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Hard data or it didn't happen.

Assuming he did manage to stabilize chloroplasts in a silk matrix, there's still no proof of any photosynthesis or metabolism going on in side his material.

Add to that his dubious claims about oxygen extending human life and improving focus, and his outright false claim that plants don't grow in microgravity.

Thus, I have to call bullshit on this.
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travis m.

10 years ago

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If it absorbs carbon dioxide and releases oxygen, what happens to the carbon? It needs to be removed from the synthetic leaf, else it will simply clog up the whole thing, right?
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