In related news, Taxa Biotechnologies (the company from the Glowing Plant kickstarter[1]) is shutting down. It seems they were just a bit too early, I think the idea still has merit.
they weren't too "early". people cloned luciferase into tobacco 30+ years ago. the problem is that there are limits into how much you can make a healthy plant glow. Also, the guy working on this didn't really know enough bio to optimize the expression levels.
This seems barely better than rubbing lightning bugs on plants. They didn't change the plants genome to produce luciferine naturally and pass that trait down to its young, they just put forced nano particles of luciferine into the plant.
Permit me to don my tinfoil hat for a moment, but that makes it "better" (for some definitions of better) in a very important way: It avoids the problem Monsanto has with people (intentionally or inadvertently) cross-pollinating their genetically engineered crops and not buying more seeds from them.
If they can industrialize and patent or keep secret the process of injecting luciferene, then to get their glowing plants you must always buy a new plant from them. You can't plant clippings or seeds with the modified genome.
I too would prefer sidewalks edged with naturally proliferating glowing ground cover, and walking through night landscapes that glow like in Avatar, but that seems to be a few steps away.
I doubt plants will replace desk lamps. Maybe only very dim ones.
Even larger organisms like humans aren't powerhouses, we only need about 100 Watt (25 Watt for the brain), imagine you also had to power a 20W lightbulb. You'd have to suddenly increase your daily food consumption by 20%.
While this sounds easy for a human, it's not going to be that healthy, even less so for a plant which probably consumes less than a couple watts and a 20 Watt light output will probably exceed any other energy usage of the plant easily.
I had some friends work on a similar project a few years ago. They found that the glowing was not bright enough to be useful for anything meaningful and it significantly hindered plant growth.
You're thinking of GFP, which requires gene editing and certain wavelengths of light which fluoresces rather than "glows". This is a pretty different approach.
As much as this appeals to me on a sci-fi level, I think that most of the potential applications being floated for it are pretty bad ideas.
For instance, no plant is ever going to replace my desk lamp when the only color it can produce is 530 nm, it is too dim to read with, and I have to worry about killing it. But the real problem there is that I don't even have a desk lamp any more. Or even a desk. My home computer station is a recliner, and my monitor is on a swing-arm.
This technology is a necessary first step to producing nirnroot, but that is the full extent of my expectations. I expect the chiming sound will come later.
Any serious application will probably have to be artificial lichens that can be painted onto surfaces that are exposed to light and moisture. Lichens are hardy little bastards, so if you cover a sidewalk in glowing lichen paint, you will likely end up with something that glows just strongly enough to expose tripping hazards on it. Paint a runway with it, and planes might be able to manage an emergency landing without the usual lighting. This light isn't bright enough for me to see any domestic uses that would displace LEDs or electroluminescent panels.
This is super cool, but it can't solve the "desk lamp" problem. All the plants people try to grow in my cube farm are anemic and sickly... they'd likely never have the spare energy to glow.
edit for clarity: unless this is for folks that work night shift, you either already get enough sunlight to have a well lit desk XOR you don't have enough sunlight to power a bioluminescent plant
Is the plant needed to produce the light? It sounds like the plant is being used as a medium to hold the light emitting particles, but otherwise isn't used to fuel or transport them.
Heard about similar experiments a couple of decades ago. Back then scientists immediately stopped the experiment. If glowing plants escape the lab it would seriously affect the natural day-night cycle in nature. Hard to predict what would happen to the night life in the forests. The pitch back then was to colonise space as plants would not need the sun for photosynthesis.
> The pitch back then was to colonise space as plants would not need the sun for photosynthesis.
That's a stupid pitch. The light is required as an energy source for the photosynthesis. Making the plant glow would consume energy from the plant. If you could make a plant that glows without an outside energy source and use this light for photosynthesis while still being energy positive, you'd have broken a few fundamental laws of physics. Having these plants escape the lab and light up woods would be the least of my worries in that case.
[+] [-] wcoenen|8 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/antonyevans/glowing-pla...
[+] [-] dekhn|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nautilus12|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LeifCarrotson|8 years ago|reply
If they can industrialize and patent or keep secret the process of injecting luciferene, then to get their glowing plants you must always buy a new plant from them. You can't plant clippings or seeds with the modified genome.
I too would prefer sidewalks edged with naturally proliferating glowing ground cover, and walking through night landscapes that glow like in Avatar, but that seems to be a few steps away.
[+] [-] lucozade|8 years ago|reply
There's something about that sentence that is just brilliant (excuse the pun). I'm not really sure why.
Maybe because it has never occurred to me that what a poinsettia was missing was a dimmer switch? No idea, but I love it.
[+] [-] zaarn|8 years ago|reply
Even larger organisms like humans aren't powerhouses, we only need about 100 Watt (25 Watt for the brain), imagine you also had to power a 20W lightbulb. You'd have to suddenly increase your daily food consumption by 20%.
While this sounds easy for a human, it's not going to be that healthy, even less so for a plant which probably consumes less than a couple watts and a 20 Watt light output will probably exceed any other energy usage of the plant easily.
[+] [-] cmac2992|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spodek|8 years ago|reply
Potentially relevant about them glowing all the time?
[+] [-] kgc|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajuc|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lowglow|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _Wintermute|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ainiriand|8 years ago|reply
Offtopic: I missread 'Engineers create plants that grow' and I was thinking: 'Yeah, this thing is going to catch investment'.
[+] [-] logfromblammo|8 years ago|reply
For instance, no plant is ever going to replace my desk lamp when the only color it can produce is 530 nm, it is too dim to read with, and I have to worry about killing it. But the real problem there is that I don't even have a desk lamp any more. Or even a desk. My home computer station is a recliner, and my monitor is on a swing-arm.
This technology is a necessary first step to producing nirnroot, but that is the full extent of my expectations. I expect the chiming sound will come later.
Any serious application will probably have to be artificial lichens that can be painted onto surfaces that are exposed to light and moisture. Lichens are hardy little bastards, so if you cover a sidewalk in glowing lichen paint, you will likely end up with something that glows just strongly enough to expose tripping hazards on it. Paint a runway with it, and planes might be able to manage an emergency landing without the usual lighting. This light isn't bright enough for me to see any domestic uses that would displace LEDs or electroluminescent panels.
[+] [-] quirkot|8 years ago|reply
edit for clarity: unless this is for folks that work night shift, you either already get enough sunlight to have a well lit desk XOR you don't have enough sunlight to power a bioluminescent plant
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] syphilis2|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carlob|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tsakas123|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Xylakant|8 years ago|reply
That's a stupid pitch. The light is required as an energy source for the photosynthesis. Making the plant glow would consume energy from the plant. If you could make a plant that glows without an outside energy source and use this light for photosynthesis while still being energy positive, you'd have broken a few fundamental laws of physics. Having these plants escape the lab and light up woods would be the least of my worries in that case.
[+] [-] PhasmaFelis|8 years ago|reply
I still can't see it being remotely practical as a light source.
[+] [-] acoye|8 years ago|reply