Scientists celebrate breakthrough after inventing game-changing method to grow tomatoes: 'A bit of a dream come true'Laurelle Stelle
The Cool DownTue, August 19, 2025 at 5:00 PM EDT
3 min read
Scientists celebrate breakthrough after inventing game-changing method to grow tomatoes: 'A bit of a dream come true'When it comes to growing sun-loving crops, you might think that the more light they get, the better they'll grow.
But in fact, researchers from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have found success diverting most wavelengths of light to generate solar energy and letting select beams hit their plants.
This method doesn't just perform as well as leaving the crops in direct sunlight — they actually grow better,
Phys.org reported.
When plants soak up the sun, they aren't benefiting from every wavelength of light. Some of the light is the exact color they need to grow — but some of the light is useless or even harmful to them.
"When full spectrum light shines on a plant, the light contains both productive and damaging photons, and plants have to deal with unneeded light by expending energy to protect itself," said Bryon Larson, an NREL chemist and principal investigator for this project.
"Algae have to do that. Regular plants have to do that. If you were to take the useful versus non-useful wavelengths of light that you need to separate out, collect the non-useful part for electricity and send the other bit through for plant growth, you've now designed a system that's overall more efficiently using solar energy because it's spectrally binning it into different functions — plant growth through photosynthesis versus electricity generation through photovoltaics. This is a unique element of our work, hence, No Photon Left Behind."
The No Photon Left Behind project started with small containers of algae, one covered with a purple filter that strained out most wavelengths of light that the algae couldn't use, and one without. The algae that absorbed filtered light grew and produced biomass more quickly.
With this proof of concept, the team moved on to a dozen tomato plants — six in an ordinary greenhouse and six in a greenhouse equipped with that selective colored film. The result: bigger, faster-growing tomatoes.
According to Larson, moving from algae straight to crops "is a bit of a dream come true. I mean, the fact that we got to grow tomatoes in the first year was way ahead of what the project was originally drawn up to do."
Although the current setup doesn't generate electricity, the idea is to eventually design a solar power-generating greenhouse that lets the ideal plant-growing light wavelengths through while collecting the rest of the sunlight to generate power.
The result would be game-changing, allowing the same land to be used for both solar farms and food farms — and the food would even grow more efficiently than it would without the solar panels, maximizing use of this space. This could help improve production, lower costs, and save an incredible amount of land for other uses or even designate it as a nature reserve.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/scientists-celebrate-breakthrough-inventing-game-210000552.html
