Engineers create plants that glow | Hacker News Reader

Engineers create plants that glow

news.mit.edu

74 pointsjbuzbee32 comments

For anyone clicking to see what they look like: the first picture, of the tree in a field, is not glowing and not from MIT. It's a stock photo of a very bright LED behind a tree.

To see the glowing plant, scroll down a bit to the other 2 pictures, or watch the source MIT video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hp-vqd8zJM4

The kickstarter project doing the same but via genetic engineering ran out of money earlier this year https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/04/whatever...

My thoughts exactly - I backed them (and I don't regret it, they were a sincere bunch) hoping one day this would come true.

I too backed and after all these years figured their updates, videos and data were worth my backing.

This research isn't particularly interesting (imo). The plant doesn't produce any glowing bits (luciferase, luciferin) by itself, but is injected using high pressure. Once the plants lose their glow, they'll need to be injected again.

also, isn’t luciferase (and other fluorescent/luminescent proteins) now trivially engineered into at least a few common plants?

Not with any useful amount of brightness yet.

If it could be added to the soil rather than injected, that wouldn't be too bad. Maybe you could even mix it with fertilizer to try to offset the extra resources consumed.

Yeah. I just invented a more cost effective method with similar results

/me whips out can of glow-in-the-dark spray paint...

Too late. A few months after that kickstarter launched, I saw some glow-in-the-dark plants at Walmart. I figured someone else had beat them to the punch. Only once I got home did I realize they had been painted.

I like this vision, it's terrific!

If the duration of the effect is only hours and then it runs out like rave glow sticks, is this tech still in a fetal stage? To fulfill the vision, an even more radical and novel approach is necessary to enable a "lightbulb plant" to be self-sustaining and not burn out for years.

It is an enzymatic reaction - and comes from fireflies, or similar biological effects. So there's no reason that - at some point - the effect cannot be entirely generated in vivo rather than upon addition of particular ingredients. The hard part is getting enough light. Enough light to read by is a lot of energy for otherwise very efficient biological processes. Once engineered though, as long as the plant is energetically productive (alive and well-fed), the glow should persist. The glow could persist as long as the plant is alive.

The paper:

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.nanolett.7b04369

So street lights that shed their leaves in the winter? Or that die during a drought? Relying on the variable metabolism of trees to prevent car crashes doesn't sound like a good idea. Something like large columnar tanks filled with cyanobacteria or algae, that can be recolonized quickly when thrown out of equilibrium, would make more sense.

Or evergreen trees that don't shed their leaves, or die during a drought because they're already there, and you water them anyway. Do street lamps really prevent car crashes?

In my experience, being able to see the road and other cars at distances beyond the reach of my headlights reduces my likelihood of crashing my car.

An undirected light source like a tree would also be terrible for light pollution. Even if you used conifers to keep them going year-round, they don't seem like very good street lights.

I want a few to use as nightlights. Even if the first plants are fairly dim, if there's not a lot of competing light they could be reasonably effective.

Linking in that Dutch designer Daan Roosegaarde was looking at this back in 2014: https://www.dezeen.com/2014/03/24/movie-sxsw-daan-roosegarde...

Interesting link. Avatar the movie (2009) had glowing vegetation on Pandora, and I am sure I could find earlier references. IIRC the algae glows in the movie The Red Planet (2000) too.

Bioluminescence is very neat, however, I worry about runaway light pollution no matter the source. I used to like to look at the stars from my rooftop in Brooklyn back in the 70s with my small refractor telescope. Now the amount of light masks the sky. My old eyes are blinded when driving at night by the pure white, intense headlights on the newer cars even if I look aside to avoid them.

If you want, you can already see bioluminescence walking outside at night on a trail. Many things light up, if you allow dark adaptation and look away, you will easily see that the entire trail is "glowing".

Interesting, reminds me of the reporter gene technique often used in genetic engineering. Genes that express green fluorescent protein (GFP), or other similar proteins, can be used as a "genetic logging." Basically if the tissue is glowing, you know your changes took.

I'm curious how much extra metabolic stress a particularly bright plant has to bear? Through genetic manipulation, and artificial selection, you could pressure the organism toward brightness. But I could imagine quickly running into some hard limit, where the plant's metabolism is taxed too heavily, and it can't survive.

No mention of how much of the plant energy budget this uses.

If this uses let's say 20%, what are the implications for the plant? Will it be less adapted to the environment and die more easily?

I like it. I especially like that Alastair Reynolds anticipated it in "Revenger".

Presumably the idea here is to store energy during the day and then return some of it during the night via glow-worm biochemistry. In "Revenger" they actually use growing plants as a kind of electric lighting -- presumably via a kind of reverse photosynthesis converting conduction-band electrons to light.

I read this initially as “engineers create plants that grow” and I was about to be like “classic engineers!”

Free idea for someone in a state where MJ is legal: glow in the dark pot. "Woooaaaahhh".

Better: glow-in-the-dark smoke!

Url changed from http://www.thespaceacademy.org/2017/12/mit-just-created-livi....

> MIT Just Created Living Plants That Glow Like a Lamp

The implications of this clickbait title don't match the reality of what MIT achieved at all.

A comment like this can be helpful when it suggests an accurate, neutral title that would serve instead. It's best if the suggested titles use representative language from the original article—there's almost always a descriptive phrase in there that says what's actually meant.

Edit: in this case we changed the URL instead, and the title with it.

Luciferase, luciferin, and Co-Enzyme A

Who named these? I feel like this field needs “meaningful variable names” just like anyone educated in Computer Science is taught.

Lucifer means light-bringer.

Lucifer means 'light-bringing' in Latin, as in the morning star, as in Venus.

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

Lucifer comes from the Latin words for light bearer, so Luciferase and luciferin make plenty of sense I think

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