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Science

Scientists Create Glowing Plants Using Mushroom Genes (theguardian.com) 66

Posted by BeauHD from the plants-of-the-future dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Emitting an eerie green glow, they look like foliage from a retro computer game, but in fact they are light-emitting plants produced in a laboratory. Researchers say the glowing greenery could not only add an unusual dimension to home decor but also open up a fresh way for scientists to explore the inner workings of plants. "In the future this technology can be used to visualize activities of different hormones inside the plants over the lifetime of the plant in different tissues, absolutely non-invasively. It can also be used to monitor plant responses to various stresses and changes in the environment, such as drought or wounding by herbivores," said Dr Karen Sarkisyan, the CEO of Planta, the startup that led the work, and a researcher at Imperial College London. "We really hope to bring this to the market in a few years from now, once we make them a bit brighter, once we make the ornamental plants with this new technology, and once of course they pass all the existing safety regulations," he added.

Writing in the journal Nature Biotechnology, Sarkisyan and a team of colleagues based in Russia and Austria report how they inserted four genes from a bioluminescent mushroom called Neonothopanus nambi into the DNA of tobacco plants. These genes relate to enzymes that convert caffeic acid, through a series of steps, into a luciferin that emits energy as light, before turning the resulting substance back into caffeic acid. The upshot is plants that glow with a greenish hue visible to the naked eye. "They glow both in the dark and in the daylight," said Sarkisyan, adding that the light appeared to be 10 times brighter than that produced by using bacterial genes. The team found the site of the luminescence changed as the plants grew, and luminescence generally decreased as leaves aged and increased where leaves became damaged. Flowers produced the most luminescence, the team report.
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Scientists Create Glowing Plants Using Mushroom Genes More

Scientists Create Glowing Plants Using Mushroom Genes

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  • Internet: Cats have precedence (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29, 2020 @10:41PM (#60006424)

    Genetically engineered glowing cats have been around for 10 years. [livescience.com]

    I'm imagining some future archaeologists recovering their DNA, and conjecturing about what specific ways glowing had survival advantage, and was therefore naturally selected for.

  • they only look like they're glowing after you had some.

    • More recently just a decade ago: https://www.kickstarter.com/pr... [kickstarter.com]

      I had to go digging because I knew I had kickstarted something like this. That kickstarter failed, but it was a very interesting ride. Some bright bioengineering students learned a lot, but not fast enough to put out a final product on the budget they had. They were at least good about writing up all their problems and solutions. I learned a fair bit from them, so I don't consider it an entirely unsuccessful kickstarter.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

        It's too bad kickstarters feel they need to put a scammy twist on everything. Plants that glow are cool. No need to claim it's going to provide sustainable lighting and thereby save the world.

  • Coming to market and fields near you (Score:4, Insightful)

    by vix86 ( 592763 ) on Thursday April 30, 2020 @12:29AM (#60006576)

    “We really hope to bring this to the market in a few years from now, once we make them a bit brighter, once we make the ornamental plants with this new technology, and once of course they pass all the existing safety regulations,” he added.

    If you thought the light pollution was bad before, wait till this starts growing invasivly all over the place. Someone isn't going to just be satisfied seeing this in a pot in their house, they're going to want this in their gardens or in that field behind their house. At least it'll be really obvious when this starts growing out of controlled environments, just fly over areas at night.

    • Unless a given plant is already invasive, giving it a glow in the dark gene is not going to give it any evolutionary advantage to make it so. And you need quite a significant amount of plantmass to match even a single measly street lamp in light output so I wouldn't really worry about cultivated plants.

      • Unless a given plant is already invasive, giving it a glow in the dark gene is not going to give it any evolutionary advantage to make it so.

        Are you positive about that? I wouldn't be so quick to assert that just because a plant is currently not invasive that its glowing counterpart would also be non-invasive. If the flowers of the genetically modified plants glow the most (and even if it was just other parts of the plant) couldn't that give them an advantage over non-bioluminescent individuals that are otherwise the same species, by attracting more pollinators; e.g. insects that would otherwise ignore the plant at night but are now attracted to

        • Perhaps you want to read up what invasive means ...

          • I know exactly what invasive means and if a plant is suddenly able to produce more offspring than it could before and/or more offspring survive then it has the potential to become invasive. I.e. it is possible that before the species' pollinators increased an individual could not produce enough offspring for it to become invasive because of many other variables. If, hypothetically, the same species is suddenly able to produce more offspring (because it's being pollinated more than before and therefore produ

            • If a species that normally produces 5 seeds per breeding cycle is suddenly able to produce 500 seeds per breeding cycle then there is the potential that it can become invasive, out competing other species.

              So the question is, did Monsanto fund the development? If so, nothing to worry about. The seeds the ornamentals produce will be sterile, because profit.

              How convenient when the profit motive dovetails perfectly with Europe's current anti-GMO frenzy...

            • I know exactly what invasive means and if a plant is suddenly able to produce more offspring than it could before and/or more offspring survive then it has the potential to become invasive.
              That is not what invasive means ... just saying .p

          • Adding to the above. Perhaps a pollinator was not present in the environment and therefore the species could not invade that environment (except through vegetative reproduction). Perhaps there is an insect in that aforementioned environment that would not normally pollinate the plant species, so seed production would be nil. Make the plant glow and suddenly maybe that insect would become interested in the plant and start visiting its flowers, enabling seed production. Suddenly you have a plant that was not

        • Could happen in theory, in practice it's quite unlikely to work like that. Spending energy on glowing instead of growing is more likely to be a detriment to fitness. The planet is a giant bio-experiment, with trillions of plants on it growing for millions of generations, anything that can biologically happen probably does sooner or later. If glowing plants never took off in nature, it's most likely for a simple reason that it doesn't offer net evolutionary advantage.

          You can compare this to cultivated crops

        • Also, intensiveness is not necessarily all about population density. Suppose a plant has a trait that kills a particular parse-site that is beneficial to another plant and disrupts the echo system. There a many ways unintended consequences can disrupt living systems.

        • Possible, of course, just about anything is possible. Unlikely, however. In general, nighttime pollenators don't rely on vision to find individual food sources (more for general navigation), and the introduction of a new glowing nighttime plant would generally go unnoticed by most.

          Consider a small local ("non-invasive") business in e.g. Colorado, who makes the decision to stay open 24/7. This _could_ in theory bring in crowds of nighttime shoppers, but in general, most shoppers in most towns aren't goi

      • And you need quite a significant amount of plantmass to match even a single measly street lamp in light output so I wouldn't really worry about cultivated plants.

        I should also add that if you've ever seen bioluminescent fungi you might also want to think again about this statement as well. For some species of bioluminescent fungi (those that I've seen in PNG and Australia) a single mushroom with a cap diameter of about 5-10mm emits enough light that you can easily read a book from them. They're quite bright given their size and surface area. As bright as a typical LED at least.

        • Human eye is extremely poor at judging absolute light intensity, put a luxmeter to it.

          • Wow, we didn't think of that! I was commenting on Slashdot not writing a thesis or paper to submit for peer review

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by redback ( 15527 )

          if they are planted along the edge of a path, you dont need them to be that bright to be useful.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Shaitan ( 22585 )

        "...match even a single measly street lamp in light output so I wouldn't really worry about cultivated plants."

        I would. Forget street lamps or functional light for a moment.. people are going to grow this stuff for decorative purposes.

    • I await the complaints of astronomers.

    • It's plant based, so can't be light pollution :P Plus, if I was a hungry herbivore and saw food outlined like quest items in video games, I'd surely go munch that. So, can't be much of an evolutionary advantage.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PPH ( 736903 )

      Taggants

      Officer (pulls driver over): So, have you been drinking or smoking weed today?

      Driver (glowing an eerie shade of green): No, ossifer. Absolutely not.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Shaitan ( 22585 )

      There was already an attempt to solve this particular problem in hopes that bio-luminescent trees could replace street lamps. It failed but I could see this update resurrecting the idea.

    • And this is why Trump will force people to plant it. He hates seeing the stars so he doesnâ(TM)t want to allow anyone to see them.

    • I was waiting for that because the first thought I had was someone planting it along the driveway and sidewalk then it getting out of control and growing all over. Then a new version of weed-n-feed that takes care of clover, dandelion, and bio luminescence.

  • If someone makes actual flowering plants that look and glow like gleamblossoms, can Bethesda successfully demand money?

    • If someone makes actual flowering plants that look and glow like gleamblossoms, can Bethesda successfully demand money?

      No. Dreaming about a possible product doesn't give you some sort of exclusive right to an actual product someone else makes, wet dreams of lawyers to the contrary.

  • I spent $200 on a glowing plant kit and all I got was a lousy t-shirt.

  • ... insert glowing genes into [unsuitable organism] and watch the money from idiot venture capilalists who think they can make a killing with it for [reasons] flood in.

  • Finally! (Score:3)

    by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Thursday April 30, 2020 @06:15AM (#60007056)

    People will soon be able to mow the lawn in the middle of the night.

  • Will they emit an annoying sound until you pick them?
  • Just eat the mushrooms and the plants will glow.
  • You'll know you've killed it when the light goes out

  • Glowing in Panama (Score:4, Informative)

    by Toad-san ( 64810 ) on Thursday April 30, 2020 @09:09AM (#60007466)

    I fondly remember a certain fungus (or whatever) glowing in the jungles of Panama, during my work there in the US Army''s Jungle Operations Training Center (JOTC) back in '67 and '68. Part of the course, "Night Operations", included us taking student patrols down jungle trails. Many of the fallen logs (always dead, never live trees) would have glowing patches and strips clearly visible as we walked by. Never very bright; your eyes had to be fully adjusted to the dark to see it at all, and there was no "secondary" illumination to speak of, so nearby objects weren't lit up by the glow. I'm amazed to read that they've made this bio-luminescence that much brighter: that must've been a good trick!

    I wouldn't mind seeing the stuff around again; for some reason, the faint green glow was very welcome, reassuring even, in what would otherwise be a very scary, ominous, dark jungle.

    Oddly, I don't remember seeing it in Vietnam. Maybe the jungles where I ran weren't moist enough? Or the fungus just didn't exist there.

  • I'm waiting for some clever grad student to insert genes for THC into tomato plants or perhaps lawn grass.

  • https://www.nytimes.com/1986/1... [nytimes.com]

    I don't mind much when this kind of thing is done in a laboratory, and stays there. But these people are talking about selling it as a houseplant.

    We really hope to bring this to the market in a few years from now, ..."

    this is the kind of statement that frankly scares the shit out of me. I know of too many situation where a GM organism that was planed to be released into the wild was stopped just in time after someone else spotted that the engineered bacteria could have VERY bad results if it got out of the lab, like wiping out a large percenta

    • this is the kind of statement that frankly scares the shit out of me. I know of too many situation where a GM organism that was planed to be released into the wild was stopped just in time after someone else spotted that the engineered bacteria could have VERY bad results if it got out of the lab, like wiping out a large percentage of agriculture crops and other plant life.

      I'm all for continuing the research, but lets keep it in the lab until we really understand what the fuck we're doing.

      *Multiple Citati

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