For centuries plants have been used as a means of medication. However, as societies dependence on plants for medicine increased, scientists needed a way to extract the needed chemicals quickly and efficiently. To do so, scientists have used synthetic chemical additives and genetic engineering. Although these methods did help extract the chemicals, they were extremely expensive and potentially harmful. Hans VanEtten took it upon himself to find a new way to produce these chemicals. In their study VanEtten and his colleagues exposed pea plants to sub-lethal levels of electricity in hopes to produce pisatin, a chemical in plants that acts as an antibiotic. The electricity not only produced pisatin, but thirteen times more than plants not exposed to electricity.
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