Engineers create plants that glow
phys.org
phys.org
[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/antonyevans/glowing-pla...
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.
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.
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.
This sounds like it could be an amazingly healthy diet product.
Who knows what a Light Emitting Daisy could achieve?
I would be surprised if they were able to make it glow only when it was dark, so put a 50% modifier on that. Then you need to account for the energy needs of the plant, any inefficiencies in the light producing chemistry and light emitting apparatus (a semi-opaque bulk emitter will absorb a lot of the radiation it produces), but we'll generously assume that's equal to the difference between a conventional electric bulb and its light output, so we can approximate the light intensity with our expectations of regular lights. But you also need to account for the photosynthetic efficiency which Wikipedia says is about 2% [1], so you are at 1% of incoming light energy in equivalent electric light power.
Solar insolation gives you up to 1 kW per square meter, a large daisy might have an irradiated area of 0.01 meters or 10W input, and you get 1% of that so 0.1W output.
That's a couple lumens, or about 10x less than a typical solar landscape light. Which is as you would expect, because we eliminated the light sensor and (more importantly) used photosynthesis instead of a solar panel.
But fortunately, these things literally grow like weeds, or on trees!
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency
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.
I see the major problem in people being me and giving the plant water with the same regularity as rain the sahara, which means I can actually kill my desk lamp by not caring enough.
On the other hand, I've heavily abused my current desk lamp and it works.
It's great in terms of theoretical research but I think it might be a bit of stretch to think it could really replace a 2$ metal arm with a off-the-shelf LED strapped to it.
But now you have a nice reminder for watering your "lamp" when it isn't glowing as usual.
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.
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.
Potentially relevant about them glowing all the time?
Offtopic: I missread 'Engineers create plants that grow' and I was thinking: 'Yeah, this thing is going to catch investment'.
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.
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
I still can't see it being remotely practical as a light source.
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.