Plants that detect bombs and drugs? Yes, that's possible and the first steps in this direction are being taken now.

Synthetic biologist Dr. June Medford of the Colorado State University says it's time to start harnessing plants' natural sensing abilities and pair them with the power of genes in other organisms.

Like Us on Facebook

It's this fact that makes some scientists consider replacing sensors and electronic devices with plants, instead.

Dr. Medford's vision will allow the breeding of certain plants like ficus that can detect bombs and drugs and ferns that detect and combat pollution. This is possible because the plants' natural sensors are more than 100 times more sensitive than a dog's.

"The way we screen airports to get on a plane is, everyone goes through detector systems and it's slow. What would make much more sense, my vision is that you would walk through a garden-like setting, with a webcam looking down on plants, seeing if they detected anything," Medford said.

Dr. Medford has been reprogramming plants in her lab to serve as "sentinels." She feels the environmental use for sentinel plants will soon be a necessity.

Currently, she's already engineered a plant genus known as arabdipopsis. It's programmed to change color when it detects TNT or certain pollutants.

She likens the genetic codes of a living organism to a set of instructions that can be applied to build better things, much like in electronics.

"Once you understand the rules, it's like anything else."

She says growing new sentinel plants could be as easy and simple as planting new seeds.

TagsSentinels, airport security