Plants normally undergo long, blazing-hot days to produce the fruits and vegetables that growers desire. The incoming suns ultraviolet (UV) rays can be severe sufficient to harm some crops. Such vegetation may gain from a built-in sunscreen. Now a crew of scientists in Australia has stepped in to lend a supporting hand.

A family of nano particles known as metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs, can take in hazardous UV radiation. Joseph Richardson is a nano-engineer. He works in Melbourne at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Bio-Nano Science and Technology. Some MOFs, he knew, can turn UV rays into different wavelengths ones those plants should use for photosynthesis. Thats the procedure through which plants produce food from light. In theory, he may feed MOFs to the plants.

The hassle is, MOFs are too massive for plant roots to take up. And cutting open the plants to load them with nano particles would harm their stems. So that was no longer an option. Instead, hes leading a research group working to make vegetation take up the building blocks of MOFs.

Their goal: to assist flora makes their own MOFs. If those MOFs can capture the tissue-damaging UV rays, they would possibly assist plants survive more difficult climates, both on Earth and in space. It all commenced when Richardson realized the constructing blocks used to make MOFs are actually small. They are so small that plant roots may slurp them up. His brainstorm: figure out a way to make these building blocks come collectively inside the plant and grow, on-site, into entire MOFs.

With that in mind, his crew dissolved the starting materials metallic atoms and unique carbon compounds in water. They then placed plant cuttings into this solution. To our amazement, these simple materials were taken up by the plant, and grew into full-formed MOFs, Richardson reports. The scientists engineered these MOFs to fluoresce. They emit an excessive green light when irradiated with UV light.

This helped affirm the flora built the MOFs on-board. Under UV light, the whole plant fluoresced. Says Richardson, this confirmed that MOFs formed in the roots, stems, leaves and other parts of plant.