Growing Plants on Thin Membranes

Japanese researchers at Mebiol have figured out a way to grow crops on clean sheets of hydrogel (commonly found in diapers), called Imec.

Imec is a plant culture technology by separating the plant from culture medium with a membrane composed of hydrogel, “Hydromembrane”.

Since “Hydromembrane” absorbs water and nutrients  from the culture medium, but  releases none of water and nutrients to the air side, the plant side surface is totally dry. Accordingly, the plant develops a lot of  fine and dense roots  closely attached on “Hydromembrane” so that the plant can take water  and nutrients directly from the membrane as much as possible. Additionally, the plant upregulates the production of sugar, amino acids, etc. in order to induce the osmotic shift of water and nutrients from “Hydromembrane”.  This means the quality of Imec products becomes very high.    .

Another important point of Imec is that the incidence of crop damage infected with pathogenic microbes  propagated in culture medium is fully controlled even without chemicals, because none of the microbes and viruses can penetrate “Hydromembrane” .