Bioluminescent trees as an alternative to electric lighting

http://blog.suny.edu/2014/03/future-cities-lit-by-beautiful-bioluminescent-trees/

by brahadeesh • 12 years ago

116 61 12 years ago

blog.suny.edu

sycren• 12 years ago

Similar work to the 2010 Cambridge University student iGEM team - http://2010.igem.org/Team:Cambridge

Here is their research for bioluminescent trees - http://2010.igem.org/Team:Cambridge/Tools/Lighting

bglazer• 12 years ago

That's a super cool idea.

I do wonder about unintended consequences. Invasive glowing trees might wreak havoc on ecosystems, especially on tree dwelling nocturnal creatures. At least they'd be easy to spot :)

JDLongley• 12 years ago

Its highly unlikely that these plants would ever succeed as an invasive species because the energy consumption required to glow puts the plant at a massive disadvantage. I ordered something similar from a kickstarter a few months ago:

http://www.glowingplant.com/

They say that within a couple generations, the glowing feature quickly disappears due to natural selection.

lentil_soup• 12 years ago

Actually quite a few scientists tried to stop that kickstarter because of the dangers it could prove to the ecosystem:

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/true-north/2013/jun/0...

vitd• 12 years ago

Serious question - what happens in fall when the leaves fall off the trees? Also, with a simple light bulb, or even lamp post, it can be replaced quickly and cheaply. (OK, maybe not cheaply for the whole lamp post, but relatively easily.) But planting a tree takes years for the tree to grow. This doesn't seem realistic to me, though it does seem really cool.

Also, how much light do they give off? All of the images on the post are computer generated. I'd like to see a photo of this actually working.

sedev• 12 years ago

The embedded video does have some footage of an actual plant glowing, but it's tiny. :(

nine_k2• 12 years ago

This probably should not completely replace street lamps, but could help better light some areas that are naturally dark and shady. Trees, instead of concealing the streetlights, would give off some light.

Consider evergreen grasses that could probably be made to glow, too. Such grass could nicely light up park lanes at night. Slightly glowing evergreen bushes growing along a walkway could help one walk at night.

Also, consider how helpful such a natural illumination would be during a power outage, especially when it happens due to a natural disaster. The light might be faint, but it will help people orient themselves, help rescue helicopters recognize the terrain, etc.

balabaster• 12 years ago

These would look wicked cool down the sides of my driveway - it doesn't need to light the whole thing, but it acts as landing lights... makes it light enough to tell where you're going at least, even if you couldn't read a book by them.

31reasons• 12 years ago

Our world will finally look like the Matrix with green glow coming from the trees everywhere.

yohann305• 12 years ago

I remember backing a kickstarter project back in 2013 which accomplished the same thing on a small plant. As of today, it barely emits enough light and it's all but ready for production. Check it out: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/antonyevans/glowing-pla...

toomuchtodo• 12 years ago

I too backed this project! Disappointed by the output, but still happy to see it reach production.

aetherson• 12 years ago

What is "enough" light?

sosuke2• 12 years ago

This doesn't sound great, what about all the tree dwelling critters that would be unable to hide or sleep?

nine_k2• 12 years ago

They could sleep on another tree.

sosuke2• 12 years ago

Indeed, I did incorrectly assume this could/would be in all the trees on the street.

sologoub2• 12 years ago

That was my thought as well. Wildlife has adapted to the city life, but changing how trees work will definitely have unintended consequences.

If like the other comments note, the impact is lost within a few generations, it's of less risk. However, if that's not true and it starts to spread, we could be looking at a serious problem.

Personally, I don't know of how much benefit this is given the low consumption of LEDs. The trees will need energy from somewhere, so their requirements for soil/nutrients will likely be a lot greater than the current tree population, resulting in need to fertilize/upkeep. This could end up being a lot more expensive than LED light poles using electricity.

Environmental impact from the need for more nutrients/fertilizer could be significant as well.

dmritard96• 12 years ago

Maybe I follow YC stuff too much but it seems this be an attempt to build momentum for the YC company working on this? http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/11/glowing-plant-is-one-of-y-c...

brahadeesh2• 12 years ago

I'm not working for that startup or any startup for that matter.

grondilu• 12 years ago

it seems to me that if this can be pulled off, it would be Nobel worthy. I mean, it would not be less cool than a blue LED, would it?

TheOtherHobbes• 12 years ago

LEDs are vastly brighter than bioluminescence. And engineered bioluminescence isn't actually new. It's one of the easiest things to engineer, and it's one of the first things the gene tech people did when they started playing with this stuff.

This 'designer/architect' seems more like a self-promoter.

There's an entire class of 'designers' who see themselves as gifted idea people, but in fact they lack the scientific literacy to realise why some ideas aren't good engineering.

Real designers do clever stuff that works in reality, not just as a concept in an illustration.

While I'm all for high quality bioengineering as a future trend, I suspect it's quite a bit harder to replace current technology with it than this 'designer' thinks.

nathan_long• 12 years ago

How much energy would a tree expend producing light? Would that kill it? If not, what extra input (in terms of nutrients, care, etc) would it need? Would these trees cross-pollinate those not intended to glow? What environmental impact might that have outside cities?

Lots of questions.

NoMoreNicksLeft• 12 years ago

Why not leave the night sky dark? It's like we have this 30,000 year old phobia that we can't ditch... there are no more tigers lurking in the darkness.

pnut• 12 years ago

Seriously, I'd much rather have night vision prosthetic eyes and not make trees into light sources.

logfromblammo• 12 years ago

Even if there were, wouldn't a more elegant solution be to engineer glowing tigers?

...perhaps not.

mkstowegnv• 12 years ago

William Blake would probably agree http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/172943 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyger

vacri• 12 years ago

Because we light our cities to help us move around, not from some fear of predators.

mjt0229• 12 years ago

Luciferin isn't what makes jellyfish glow, that's GFP. GFP, at least, requires a specific light input to cause the glow (UV at a particular wavelength depending on the molecule). I don't know about Luciferin, though.

dnautics• 12 years ago

luciferin makes the jellyfish glow, by creating the photon that gets transferred to (and illuminates) the GFP.

pcrh• 12 years ago

Luciferin is converted to a reactive intermediate by the enzyme luciferase in a reaction that uses ATP (produced by mitochondria), this intermediate reacts with O2 to produce light.

sampo• 12 years ago

Luciferin is what makes fireflys glow. Luciferin really produces light from chemical energy. GFP (Green Fluorescent Protein) is just fluorescent, not luminescent.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luciferin

WhitneyLand• 12 years ago

FAQ on a similar glowing plant effort: http://bioglowtech.com/FAQ.html

Terr_• 12 years ago

This over-hyped crap again? Humbug!

Call me when someone solves the REAL problem, which is the energy budget needed to make the amount of light people actually want.

That'll probably involve some way to shunt externally-generated electrical power into the tree.

hellbanner• 12 years ago

Seriously. I saw a video from a major oil company (Exxon IIRC) sponsoring a demo day. "We want to power the cities of the future" it said. Those cities were dozens of skyscrapers filled with electricity -- people watching giant televisions, using giant iPads, every thing in their home, work and street just glowing.

brahadeesh2• 12 years ago

They way I see it, it's not going to completely replace street lighting. It's going to supplement available light, thus reducing our energy consumption among other benefits like producing oxygen. I'm especially excited about the possibility of genetically modifying trees that produce edible stuff to have bio luminescence, that'd be pretty cool.

devindotcom• 12 years ago

The processes involved are orders of magnitude below the scale needed to produce usable light. And in the plants it's been tested in, it's also fatal after a short time. These aren't trivial problems, and they're not going to be solved by a designer photoshopping a concept.

teekert• 12 years ago

Exactly, I once did the calculation, they use the protein luciferase, which requires 1 molecule of Lucferin and 1 molecule of ATP per photon produced! That means if you were to produce say 200 lm (about the output of a 40W incandescent light bulb) you'd need kilo's of ATP and Luciferin a week. Don't expect useful light.

saalweachter• 12 years ago

Doing plausibility calculations from another direction--

Let's say that we want to have a glowing forest. The glowing trees will absorb sunlight from a certain area and emit it over the same area with a certain efficiency.

Photosynthesis has an efficiency of between 0.1% and 1%. I don't know what the efficiency of glowing is, so let's assume it's 10%. So your plants will illuminate the area with about 0.01%-0.1% of the intensity of the light which they absorb.

Full daylight is about 100,000 lux, so your forest will be illuminated to somewhere around 10-100 lux, which is somewhere between "twilight" and "a poorly lit room".

It gets even worse if you want your plants to illuminate a larger area than they themselves cover: if you have a plant illuminating (say) 10x more area than it covers (a tree in the middle of an open field, or next to a road), you're down to 1-10 lux, optimistically.

Dylan168074• 12 years ago

Only kilos? Compared to bamboo that actually sounds feasible.

bduerst• 12 years ago

Well, 1 kg of ATP is about 2 moles, and since this is ATP->AMP (10.9 kcal/mol) that's about 21.8 kcal, ignoring other upkeep.

Basically 1kg ATP is 21.8 kilocalories

roywiggins2• 12 years ago

Reminds me of a "design concept" for a little Nest-shaped box to stick on your window and magically cancel out all street noise. I'm pretty sure this is actually impossible, and is the equivalent of drawing a pegasus and saying "I have this great concept for a novel form of transportation!" i.e. more or less not worth anyone's time, since it's fantasy.

chillacy• 12 years ago

Possible in a controlled lab environment if you can destructively interfere the sound, but it's gonna depend on the sounds as well as knowing the location of the listener

titanomachy3• 12 years ago

Wouldn't it be simpler to just genetically engineer humans to have better night vision? :P

mnemonicsloth• 12 years ago

Turning off the lights takes a chainsaw and ten minutes of labor per light. Turning them back on again takes transplantable saplings and a 20 year wait. Some ideas get less elegant the longer you look at them.

jszymborski• 12 years ago

There are a lot of problems with this that have been outlined in all these comments, and 99% are true.

I would instead take advantages of photoautrophic organisms that already are bioluminescent like Dinoflagellate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinoflagellate

They can have a startling effect in large numbers and feed themselves with daylight.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioluminescence#mediaviewer/Fi...

Some video of their effect

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSROHwGaLCg

fineline• 12 years ago

I saw this effect off the beach near me a few weeks ago, it was quite captivating as the breakers were lit up as if by an underwater neon (I actually thought it was an artificial light show of some kind at first). But although deeply impressive, it certainly wouldn't have had a meaningful effect on visibility of the neighbouring land. Moonlight is much more effective.

xg15• 12 years ago

So while we humans use a massive amount of generated electricity to defeat darkness, Jellyfish create their own light deep underwater without solar panels, wind turbines, or hydroelectric dams. Instead, the organism generates power completely autonomously.

They don't need energy, they just generate it autonomously. Why didn't we think of this earlier? The logic is flawless!

codemonkeymike• 12 years ago

I heard on NPR they are trying to bring back the American Chestnut, which is being killed by a fungus from Asia. To be able to plant this genetically modified tree outside of test beds will take 5-10 years in just regulation issues alone. So even if they made this bioluminecent tree tomorrow (Which in itself is impossible) we wouldn't see these on the side of the rode for another 10+ years.

Bioluminescent trees as an alternative to electric lighting

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