
Engineers create plants that glow - dnetesn
https://phys.org/news/2017-12-engineers-create-plants-that-glow.html
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wcoenen
In related news, Taxa Biotechnologies (the company from the Glowing Plant
kickstarter[1]) is shutting down. It seems they were just a bit too early, I
think the idea still has merit.

[1] [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/antonyevans/glowing-
pla...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/antonyevans/glowing-plants-
natural-lighting-with-no-electricit/description)

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dekhn
they weren't too "early". people cloned luciferase into tobacco 30+ years ago.
the problem is that there are limits into how much you can make a healthy
plant glow. Also, the guy working on this didn't really know enough bio to
optimize the expression levels.

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nautilus12
This seems barely better than rubbing lightning bugs on plants. They didn't
change the plants genome to produce luciferine naturally and pass that trait
down to its young, they just put forced nano particles of luciferine into the
plant.

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LeifCarrotson
Permit me to don my tinfoil hat for a moment, but that makes it "better" (for
some definitions of better) in a very important way: It avoids the problem
Monsanto has with people (intentionally or inadvertently) cross-pollinating
their genetically engineered crops and not buying more seeds from them.

If they can industrialize and patent or keep secret the process of injecting
luciferene, then to get their glowing plants you must always buy a new plant
from them. You can't plant clippings or seeds with the modified genome.

I too would prefer sidewalks edged with naturally proliferating glowing ground
cover, and walking through night landscapes that glow like in Avatar, but that
seems to be a few steps away.

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lucozade
> The vision is to make a plant that will function as a desk lamp

There's something about that sentence that is just brilliant (excuse the pun).
I'm not really sure why.

Maybe because it has never occurred to me that what a poinsettia was missing
was a dimmer switch? No idea, but I love it.

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zaarn
I doubt plants will replace desk lamps. Maybe only very dim ones.

Even larger organisms like humans aren't powerhouses, we only need about 100
Watt (25 Watt for the brain), imagine you also had to power a 20W lightbulb.
You'd have to suddenly increase your daily food consumption by 20%.

While this sounds easy for a human, it's not going to be that healthy, even
less so for a plant which probably consumes less than a couple watts and a 20
Watt light output will probably exceed any other energy usage of the plant
easily.

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IanCal
I think this will depend on the overall efficiency, but I can find portable
reading lights at 1W, and I've got a 5W bulb in my hall. 20W is quite a lot
for LEDs.

In general I agree, though I'd be interested to see the overall efficiency and
output, whether your could get that kind of output from a larger plant.

I'm concerned about the (even theoretical) end to end efficiency compared to
something like a solar panel + led setup.

> This technology could also be used to provide low-intensity indoor lighting,
> or to transform trees into self-powered streetlights, the researchers say.

Streetlights that glow _up_ significantly sounds like a horrible idea for
light pollution.

While interesting, and I'm happy seeing research done without clear
monetisation, I'm not sure what key problems glowing plants actually solve. An
honest question, as lots of smart people working on this I assume know a lot
more about the issues than someone who's been thinking about it for 5 minutes.

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seszett
> _I 'm concerned about the (even theoretical) end to end efficiency compared
> to something like a solar panel + led setup._

The maximum theoretical efficiency of chlorophyll-based photosynthesis with
sunlight is 11%. That's already less than what solar panels can provide, and
no plant achieves that. Then they store this energy in biomass, with a global
efficiency of typically less than 1%.

Then, they will likely also use a very inefficient process to convert matter
back into light, I'd assume less than 1% efficiency given the complicated
pathways used. We're already at something like 0.01% efficiency from sunlight
to artificial light at this point.

It's actually logical, since instead of converting light to readily-usable
electricity, plants convert light into energy that they use to live, matter
that they use to build themselves, and matter used for storage. Only the
latest fraction is usable to create light, and most of it is already intended
for the plant to live during the night. A solar panel has none of this
overhead.

There is absolutely no way that plants will ever come close to competing with
artificial lighting. They won't _glow_ , at most they will be able to be
faintly seen in the dark.

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IanCal
Thanks for the figures.

There's another general issue with this in that I can position solar panels to
be best for receiving light and the bulb best for projecting it. A glowing
leaf needs to do both.

Perhaps there are other good uses, if this can be targeted to specific issues
with a plant (e.g. make it happen when they're being attacked by bugs, or need
watering, or something like that) then it could be used as a signal we can
cheaply detect.

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RepressedEmu
If a plant glows while you're eating it, is it a cry for help??

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cmac2992
I had some friends work on a similar project a few years ago. They found that
the glowing was not bright enough to be useful for anything meaningful and it
significantly hindered plant growth.

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spodek
“If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We
might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.” -- Jack Handy

Potentially relevant about them glowing all the time?

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kgc
I initially read this as "Engineers create plants that grow"

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ajuc
Would be a huge breakthrough.

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lowglow
Hasn't this been a thing since forever? I remember also reading something
about a glowing rabbit at one point in school.

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_Wintermute
You're thinking of GFP, which requires gene editing and certain wavelengths of
light which fluoresces rather than "glows". This is a pretty different
approach.

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logfromblammo
As much as this appeals to me on a sci-fi level, I think that most of the
potential applications being floated for it are pretty bad ideas.

For instance, no plant is ever going to replace my desk lamp when the only
color it can produce is 530 nm, it is too dim to read with, and I have to
worry about _killing it_. But the _real_ problem there is that I don't even
have a desk lamp any more. Or even a desk. My home computer station is a
recliner, and my monitor is on a swing-arm.

This technology is a necessary first step to producing nirnroot, but that is
the full extent of my expectations. I expect the chiming sound will come
later.

Any serious application will probably have to be artificial lichens that can
be painted onto surfaces that are exposed to light and moisture. Lichens are
hardy little bastards, so if you cover a sidewalk in glowing lichen paint, you
will likely end up with something that glows just strongly enough to expose
tripping hazards on it. Paint a runway with it, and planes might be able to
manage an emergency landing without the usual lighting. This light isn't
bright enough for me to see any domestic uses that would displace LEDs or
electroluminescent panels.

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quirkot
This is super cool, but it can't solve the "desk lamp" problem. All the plants
people try to grow in my cube farm are anemic and sickly... they'd likely
never have the spare energy to glow.

edit for clarity: unless this is for folks that work night shift, you either
already get enough sunlight to have a well lit desk XOR you don't have enough
sunlight to power a bioluminescent plant

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syphilis2
Is the plant needed to produce the light? It sounds like the plant is being
used as a medium to hold the light emitting particles, but otherwise isn't
used to fuel or transport them.

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carlob
What I really want to know is whether the leaves keep growing after you cut
them: I want to eat some glowing salad!

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tsakas123
Heard about similar experiments a couple of decades ago. Back then scientists
immediately stopped the experiment. If glowing plants escape the lab it would
seriously affect the natural day-night cycle in nature. Hard to predict what
would happen to the night life in the forests. The pitch back then was to
colonise space as plants would not need the sun for photosynthesis.

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Xylakant
> The pitch back then was to colonise space as plants would not need the sun
> for photosynthesis.

That's a stupid pitch. The light is required as an energy source for the
photosynthesis. Making the plant glow would consume energy from the plant. If
you could make a plant that glows without an outside energy source and use
this light for photosynthesis while still being energy positive, you'd have
broken a few fundamental laws of physics. Having these plants escape the lab
and light up woods would be the least of my worries in that case.

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acoye
We now can engineer a forest like in Avatar. I like this idea.

