Glowing Potato Plants as Dryness Alert

dschuetz writes "Scientists in London (Reuters, on Excite) have developed a potato plant that faintly glows green when it needs water. The idea is to plant these as "sentinels" in a field of normal potatoes. A cool idea, but haven't we proven in the past that genetic modifications eventually spread from any openly planted crop to neighboring unmodified plants? Is there any real future for modified plants, or are we going to find some way to truly keep them isolated, genetically, from plants for consumption?" If you can have glowing christmas trees, why not potatoes, that's what I say.

Isolation

[billybob2001]

The potatoes are not intended to be eaten but would act as "sentinels," planted beside the commercial crop to alert a farmer that the rest of his field needed watering.

So how do they keep them apart at harvest time?

If they are isolated in some way whilst growing, they won't be indicating anything very relevant.

then lowing potato chips

[scotpurl]

then, to go with the green ketchup out there, they'll come up with green, glowing ketchup.

Then, to go with the green, glowing ketchup, we'll all decide that it'd be easier to find our kids if they glowed, gently....

why the publicity now?

[eellis]

This story has been around for over a year, see eg. here [exn.ca] or here [healthwellexchange.com]. I wonder why there's so much publicity surrounding it right now? (I heard a "news" article about this on the usually excellent BBC Radio 4 today [bbc.co.uk] programme). Perhaps they're about to try and commercialise this?

Re:Better yet

[tesserae]

...you're taking all the fun out of this...

---

Re:Isolation

[dmatos]

Okay, here's the (possible) solution to your GenEng problems:

Make the potato plants sterile outside of the laboratory. I'm pretty sure this is done for other types of modified organisms. There goes your worries about the modified genes getting out into the rest of the crop.

If the plants are glowing gently, it would be a fairly simple matter to manually remove the fifteen or twenty plants in a field, prior to harvesting. If you plant one or two of these plants separated from the rest of the crop by three or four feet, they would still be a good indicator of dry soil in the rest of the field, but easy enough to identify and remove before the rest of the field is harvested.

Of course, the same thing could be done with a bunch of hydrometers (sp?) - things that measure moisture. I have one for my plants at home. Just get a bunch of them and stick them into the ground around the field. Then, you don't have to worry about GM fears, and, you can re-use them from year to year. Why do some people have to over-complicate things.

That said, cool! I want glow in the dark plants in my house. It'd be much better than night-lights!

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Better yet

[tesserae]

Of course, the same thing could be done with a bunch of hydrometers

But you have to go there to read the hygrometer -- all you have to do with the faintly glowing green plants is look out the window (well, at night...).

Better yet: you need a plant that will radio you when it wants water. Oh, where is Kevin Warwick [kevinwarwick.org.uk] when you need him?

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Re:Better yet

[Pentapod]

They tried that with roses... roses (or most plants, but roses are particularly sensitive) transport water from the roots up the plant in long columns (veins). Evaporation from the leaves pulls more water up, and pressure from incoming water below also pushes the water up; the water in the veins is therefore under tension. If the water is being lost from above faster than it can be replenished from below, e.g. if there's not a lot of water to be had below, the tension that the water is under eventually causes "cavitations", which is when a bubble of gas appears in the water in the vein.

Some smart dudes hooked up microphones to roses in a greenhouse and when the roses were subjected to water stress they could actually hear the cavitations appearing like pop-pop-popcorn. This would then either turn on the sprinklers automatically, or alert someone to turn on the sprinklers, depending on how high-tech they wanted to get.

So your plants really can talk to you!

Pentapod - (feed me, Seymore!)

Seperation oif plants or stoping reproduction

[bluelip]

The next advance needs to be to have neutered genetically modified plants. Then after that, neuter the scientists. Leave well enough alone. Will these plants allow for precise remote monitoring? The farmer will still need to drive to the field. In which case, he can just check the soil then using the time tested method of "playing" in the dirt to see if it clumps.

Glowing potato, hot tamale!

[Prime Mover]

Greetings,
I submitted a story on this as well. Probably rejected. Anyhoo, I found it funny that genetic engineering suffers from 'feature creep' just like software engineering ;-)

Prime Mover

Re:Isolation

[dmatos]

Well, if one plant every 100m is sufficient to indicate roughly what the water situation is in a field, and you place them in a square grid (to make it easier) you could get away with a field 500mx600m. Alright, that's a little bit small. You win.

However, I'm sure that you could figure out a way to easily harvest the GM plants separately from the others. Here's a new idea: every once in a while make a row of glowing potatoes. You can then use an automatic picker of some sort to clean out that row. Of course, as an added step, when the potatoes are harvested, run them through a dark room on a conveyor belt and pick out any that glow.

Re:Better yet

[dmatos]

So just wire up the hygrometer to the controller of the sprinkler system. Then you don't even have to worry about turning on the water when your field is glowing. Plant the field, hook up the hygrometers, wait, take down the hygrometers, harvest the field. Occasionally spray pest/herbicide if you're into that kind of thing.