Skip to main content

Tomatoes, juicy, delicious and even more nutritious -- thanks to LED lighting

2010 0902 G020.jpg

In the Netherlands, they have been growing food in greenhouses for a long time. Lighting systems have improved production and extended growing seasons -- now they're pumping up the nutrition too.

Research by Wageningen University (Netherlands) Greenhouse Horticulture in collaboration with Philips has shown that tomatoes can be even more nutritious when grown with LED lighting. The partnership will be continued in a joint facility for research into the application of LED lamps in horticulture (IDC LED), which was to be opened in Bleiswijk (NL) this week.

In the tomato variety that showed the strongest reaction, the tomatoes receiving extra light from the LEDs contained up to twice as much vitamin C as the tomatoes not exposed to the LEDs. The doubling of the vitamin C level was achieved with an extra dose of light similar to a quarter of the natural light intensity on a sunny day.

Wageningen University and Research Greenhouse Horticulture performed its research within the framework of the project Gezond uit de Kas (Health from the Greenhouse), financed by the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs.

Comments

  1. nice thought ,it looks like gorgeous, thanks for sharing.... Indoor Grow Lights

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ten Ways to Celebrate the first International Day of Light

The first International Day of Light (IDL) is less than a month away. A global initiative highlighting the importance of light and light-based technologies, communities around the world are planning events celebrating IDL on 16 May. First Place Winner of the 2017 SPIE IDL Photo Contest SPIE will participate in outreach events local to our community in Bellingham, Washington, attend the inauguration in Paris, France, and host an IDL reception for our conference attendees at SPIE Optical Systems Design in Frankfurt, Germany taking place May 14-17. SPIE is also supporting local events in 13 different communities from the US to India, Canada to South Africa, who were awarded SPIE IDL Micro Grants to create activities that highlight the critical role light plays in our daily lives. Do you need some ideas on how to show your appreciation of light on the 16th? Here is our top ten list of ways you can celebrate IDL 2018: 1. Throw a Celebration:  Light up your party with ligh...

#FacesofPhotonics: NASA Intern Elaine Stewart

MIRROR, MIRROR: Elaine with the JWST at Goddard Space  Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland Meet Elaine Stewart: chemical engineering student, world-traveler, intern at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, and this week's SPIE Face of Photonics. Elaine is fascinated by space exploration and how optics impacts our ability to "study distant stars that have never been seen before." Her research has taken her around the world -- from Bochum, Germany, where she studied material science and engineering at Ruhr-Universität, to Houston, Texas, to work on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) while it was under cryogenic vacuum chamber testing, to Melbourne, Australia, where she studied biochemical and product engineering at the University of Melbourne in 2017. And, when she's not busy traversing the globe, she is focusing on graduating from the University of Delaware in 2019 with a Bachelor's in Chemical Engineering. Elaine makes a point of remaining an active...

Cataract surgery: misnomer?

On left, the patient’s left eye has no cataract and all structures are visible. On right, retinal image from fundus camera confirms the presence of a cataract. (From Choi, Hjelmstad, Taibl, and Sayegh, SPIE Proc. 85671Y , 2013)   Article by guest blogger Roger S. Reiss , SPIE Fellow and recipient of the 2000 SPIE President's Award. Reiss was the original Ad Hoc Chair of SPIE Optomechanical Working Group. He manages the LinkedIn Group “ Photonic Engineering and Photonic Instruments .” The human eye and its interface with the human brain fit the definition of an "instrument system."   The human eye by itself is also an instrument by definition. After the invention of the microscope and the telescope, the human eye was the first and only detector for hundreds of years, only to be supplemented and in most cases supplanted by an electro-optical detector of various configurations. The evolution of the eye has been and still is a mystery.   In National Geogr...