Engineers create plants that glow

https://phys.org/news/2017-12-engineers-create-plants-that-glow.html

by dnetesn • 9 years ago

62 33 9 years ago

lowglow• 9 years ago

Hasn't this been a thing since forever? I remember also reading something about a glowing rabbit at one point in school.

_Wintermute• 9 years ago

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.

ainiriand• 9 years ago

Yeah I remember that one. Even glowing vegetables for medicine, not only decorative plants.

Offtopic: I missread 'Engineers create plants that grow' and I was thinking: 'Yeah, this thing is going to catch investment'.

lucozade2• 9 years ago

The vision is to make a plant that will function as a desk lamp

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.

zaarn3• 9 years ago

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.

carlmr• 9 years ago

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%.

This sounds like it could be an amazingly healthy diet product.

lucozade2• 9 years ago

I think you're making an assumption about lumens/watt that may or may not be valid.

Who knows what a Light Emitting Daisy could achieve?

IanCal2• 9 years ago

I think this will depend on the overall efficiency, but I can find portable reading lights at 1W, and I've got a 5W bulb in my hall. 20W is quite a lot for LEDs.

In general I agree, though I'd be interested to see the overall efficiency and output, whether your could get that kind of output from a larger plant.

I'm concerned about the (even theoretical) end to end efficiency compared to something like a solar panel + led setup.

This technology could also be used to provide low-intensity indoor lighting, or to transform trees into self-powered streetlights, the researchers say.

Streetlights that glow up significantly sounds like a horrible idea for light pollution.

While interesting, and I'm happy seeing research done without clear monetisation, I'm not sure what key problems glowing plants actually solve. An honest question, as lots of smart people working on this I assume know a lot more about the issues than someone who's been thinking about it for 5 minutes.

acoye• 9 years ago

We now can engineer a forest like in Avatar. I like this idea.

carlob• 9 years ago

What I really want to know is whether the leaves keep growing after you cut them: I want to eat some glowing salad!

wcoenen• 9 years ago

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.

[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/antonyevans/glowing-pla...

dekhn• 9 years ago

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.

tsakas123• 9 years ago

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.

PhasmaFelis• 9 years ago

Apparently this is done by injecting nanoparticles into each mature plant, not by gene-editing, so the plant's offspring won't glow.

I still can't see it being remotely practical as a light source.

Xylakant2• 9 years ago

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.

kgc• 9 years ago

I initially read this as "Engineers create plants that grow"

ajuc• 9 years ago

Would be a huge breakthrough.

spodek• 9 years ago

“If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.” -- Jack Handy

Potentially relevant about them glowing all the time?

nautilus12• 9 years ago

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.

LeifCarrotson2• 9 years ago

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.

cmac2992• 9 years ago

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.

quirkot• 9 years ago

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

logfromblammo• 9 years ago

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.

syphilis2• 9 years ago

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.

Engineers create plants that glow

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