Gwyn D'Mello April 16, 2019

In order for farmers to make a decent profit on their crops, they need to have a reliable produce.

Of course, they only have limited land to work with, so limited number of plants need to have enough weightage of output. Unfortunately, that can result in tasteless produce.

Think of a simple vegetable (fruit?) like tomato. You might see two different varieties of it in your local market, where one is much larger but the smaller ones are tastier. That's due to something scientists called the "dilution effect", where there's an overlap between the compounds a plant requires to produce more or produce tastier fruit.

That's why you're more likely to see this happen with a large scale farm as opposed to when you grow tomatoes in your garden. But apparently, it doesn't have to be that way, at least according to researchers at MIT.

Scientists at the University's OpenAG group have been researching basil plants in particular, led by principal researcher Caleb Harper. They've been trying to change the various stress factors acting on basil plants to see how it changes the flavour. "If you took the same basil seed and you put in 50 different countries, you would have started with the same genetics but you would get 50 different flavors," he told Digital Trends.

The process behind tastier vegetables

What these researchers, in partnership with the University of Texas, found is that exposing basil to light 24 hours a day made them the most flavourful. The constant light produced more secondary metabolites. These are organic compounds the plants don't necessarily need to survive, but can help them keep away animals that eat them. And the presence of these are affected by everything from drought to the presence of certain insects, ultimately changing how the plants taste.

The researchers had no reason to believe 24-hour light exposure would make the basil tastier, they instead went with 18 hours to begin with. It was a custom-developed AI algorithm, developed by MIT and Cognizant, that analysed all the factors and made the suggestion. In fact, that same AI was originally used by the startup that developed it (before being acquired by Cognizant) for hedge fund trading.

The basil was grown in hydroponic boxes, full of sensors and circuits, allowing the scientists to completely control everything from temperature, to humidity, to the light intensity and exposure.

But ultimately this experiment wasn't just about making industrial agriculture plants tastier. Using the AI, researchers can possibly even have the plants develop in other ways. For instance, Harper talks about his dream for "diabetes basil", grown in such a way that it's rich in proteins found to be helpful in treating the illness.

"That's kind of amazing that we could design flavor from climate," he said. "And now we're going to see can we design nutrition."

IMAGES COURTESY: MIT