Trees impregnated with gold might someday line city streets | Hacker News Reader

Trees impregnated with gold might someday line city streets

bldgblog.blogspot.com

26 pointscwan8 comments

Call me a cynic, but I think it wouldn't be long until those trees were chopped down by someone wanting to extract the gold to sell it (a bit like how people steal cable from construction sites, or even old church roofs for the metal value).

The thought made me a bit sad since the idea of magical glowing trees lining our streets was so beatiful. Hm. I guess that at least means I'm not as cynic as I thought, which is good, I guess. :)

Happily there are too many people that haven't heard that things cannot be done, so they attempt... and do them.

To me this seems more like a proof of concept article, yet, it opens an area of research which may in fact succeed after some time. And there are a so many easy ways to make something like this hard to steal- I won't go into details because this is not the important here.

or you could just use flourescent proteins instead of gold. The project seems more like a solution looking for an answer, honestly.

Nanoparticles of gold aren't going to make you a millionaire unless you knock down a rainforest the size of South America.

cute, but where is the energy for all that light coming from? Can't be healthy for the growth of the tree.

The article explains that the trees are only glowing because they are being illuminated by ultraviolet light - the energy comes from the UV.

I would imagine that this would be much less efficient than normal lighting and constant exposure to UV probably wouldn't do the trees or people any good at all.

usually plants/animals that glow provide their own UV light via a luciferase/luciferin system. Still takes energy.

At that point, you might as well just engineer a luciferase system (three well known ones: renilla, firefly, bacterial) that emits blue light and throw in a chain of flourescent proteins (gfp, rfp) that shunts an appropriate amount of color down the chain. Then, you could use a promoter system to force expression only on the bottom side of the leaf, and only during the nighttime.

Very possible within the realm of current science, the only question is how well would the tree tolerate it. And considering it takes years for a tree to get that big, that's a long time to wait to find out.

Even if it just takes a tiny amount of gold to do this- is our supply that plentiful that we can use it for lighting our streets?

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