

Trees impregnated with gold might someday line city streets - cwan
http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/gold-is-metal.html

======
unwind
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. :)

~~~
mitko
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.

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

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

~~~
arethuza
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.

~~~
dnautics
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.

------
S_A_P
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?

