By Anupum Pant
Julian Melchiorri, a graduate student from Royal College of art, claims to have fabricated the first ever man-made biological leaf which absorbs water & carbon dioxide, just like a leaf does, and produces oxygen.
It looks like a promising first step towards enabling longer distance space travel – in a way that the artificial leaf made by him could be used to supply oxygen in micro-gravity, in which terrestrial plants have a hard time growing.
The artificial leaf he made for his project involves extracted chloroplasts from plant cells laid on a matrix of silk protein.
The “first man-made biological leaf” could enable humans to colonise space from Dezeen on Vimeo.