Detecting landmines with plants

Aresa, a Danish company, has genetically engineered plants of Arabidopsis thaliana (thale cress) that generate anthocyanins in the presence of nitrous dioxide. As nitrous dioxide is released by landmines, the plants turn from green to red.

Links:

Plants to uncover landmines from Nature's Science Update
GM cress could seek out landmines from BBC

Posted by Daniel Mosquin at 4:56 PM on January 29, 2004

Want to talk about this weblog entry? As of August 22, 2006, all new entries and most older entries are cross-posted to the UBC Botanical Garden Discussion Forums for discussion (you might need to use the search function to find the thread you are looking for).

This is an effort to reduce the amount of time spent dealing with spam (the forums are very good at stopping spam, the weblog commenting system is not so good).

Older entries already containing comments remain open for discussion.