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MIT researchers explained how to grow the most tasty basil: expose the plant 24 hours a day. The nugget comes from a project in which scientists have grown the herb in an expedition container. , a controlled environment that allowed them to accurately monitor all aspects of the experiment, reports Quartz. And it's not frank: no genetic engineering has been involved, notes the Science Times. But researchers have used machine learning algorithms to process data for their "climate recipe", which they detail in Plos One. The end result was not simply a test of subjective taste: scientists discovered that basil exposed to constant light resulted in more molecules associated with flavor.
"Initially, it was supposed that basil needed a period of darkness to produce an ideal result, but that assumption turned out to be wrong," they write. "The highest density of aroma molecules has been produced by subjecting plants to light all day long." The main objective of the experiment is to define such methods of "e-agriculture" and then make them public. "We are really interested in building networked tools that can take the experience of a plant, its phenotype, all the constraints it meets and its genetics, and Digitize this to allow us to understand the plant-environment interaction, "says an MIT Open Farm Initiative researcher. The team now plans to focus on how to grow basil with a higher level of compounds known to fight diseases such as diabetes, by release. (Read more stories from MIT.)
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