Harvesting Gold Nanoparticles WIth Alfalfa Plants

Posted by timothy on Tuesday August 20, 2002 @08:29AM from the buckwheat's-next dept.

Rocky Mudbutt writes: "An international research team from the University of Texas-El Paso (UTEP) and Mexico advanced the work at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (SSRL). Ordinary alfalfa plants are being used as miniature gold factories that one day could provide the nanotechnology industry with a continuous harvest of gold nanoparticles. Alfalfa extracts gold from the medium and stores it in the form of nanoparticles -- specks of gold less than a billionth of a meter across according to a press release from Stanford Linear Accelerator Center."

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This is nano-fabrication, not mineral extraction by Animats · 2002-08-21 05:36 · Score: 5, Informative

Read the paper. This is a way of fabricating gold nanoparticles, not extracting gold. They grow small amounts of alfalfa in a controlled environment with extra gold in the soil. The gold nanoparticles are useful for some biosensor applications, because they will bond to DNA and can easily be detected.