Living Plants That Glow Like a Lamp (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Living Plants That Glow Like a Lamp (2018)

physics-astronomy.org

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I signed up for the original Kickstarter version of this, which failed spectacularly when it turned out genetic engineering was slightly beyond the capabilities of the college kids who started it.

Eventually an actual scientist (one of the originators of the technology) started his own glowing plant company, and they actually delivered. I had a real live glowing tobacco plant that lived for about three years.

It was dim enough that to view it, you had to go into a completely dark room and let your eyes adjust for about ten minutes.

Pretty cool though.

I backed that Kickstarter too! They found it more difficult than they anticipated, but I’m still glad I backed them. They made a good faith effort to do something cool, and as I recall, they were good about communicating their efforts and obstacles.

What was the name of the company that delivered? Any chance they’re making progress on better output?

Gleaux. Their website appears to be down though, so it's possible they went under at some point.

Oh, yeah. I kickstarted this too! Got lots of updates for four years, then... nothing.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/04/whatever...

> Michael Strano, professor of chemical engineering at MIT and the senior author of the study, said: 'The vision is to make a plant that will function as a desk lamp — a lamp that you don't have to plug in. The light is ultimately powered by the energy metabolism of the plant itself. Our work very seriously opens up the doorway to streetlamps that are nothing but treated trees, and to indirect lighting around homes.'

Someone help me... I can’t make the numbers work. How can you create plants with enough energy to provide light to read or make your neighborhood safer without sharply increasing their food supply & metabolism? They’d have to photosynthesize vastly more than they do already.

Also those pictures, if genuine (and I don’t think the picture of the tree is) are definitely long exposures.

Sunlight is about 1000W/m^2. The efficiency of photosynthesis is about 0.2% https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency

So assuming a 100% efficiency in the conversion of the products of the photosynthesis to light, a 12h+12h light/dark cicle, 100% canopy coverage, ignoring the branches, ignoring that plants need energy for other activities and ignoring that the plant will release 1/2 of the light to the sky instead of to the floor, we get 2W/m^2 for illumination at night.

For a 3mx3m room (10ftx10ft), I'm happy with a 18W LED lamp, and streets are usually darker. (I can't find the official recommendation.)

I'm ignoring a lot of inefficiency sources, so assuming a 100% efficiency after photosynthesis is too optimistic. Organic reactions are usually far from 100% efficiency. I think that a 10% is still optimistic, but it's difficult to give an accurate estimation.

So I think it's not ruled out by the laws of physics, but I don't expect it to be viable as a street illumination method. (On the scale from 1 to Nessie, I'd rate it as Yeti.)

That sounds like a figure that reflects how little energy a plant needs. Becoming an active light source requires more energy than the evolved requirements of plant life. So you have to engineer the whole cycle into the plant.

That is likely the primary issue. Same with a bunch of cool sci-fi things you can do with gene editing in other organisms.

Most organisms are exceedingly energy efficient. [Build me an humanoid-like robot with all its attendant capabilities that can be powered on 2000 calories of snickers bars and apples...]

In order for these things to put of the kind of wattage we're familiar with even in a candle, you'd have to be feeding those plants some really crazy food (not what they usually do), or be charging them up with some super crazy laser (kinda defeats the point of a bio-light).

However, it's still super cool. And you could probably find all sorts of ways to actually charge up a plant in the long run, and as technology matures. Maybe have a whole 'forest' providing energy to a single 'lamp', or be able to provide some direct reservoir of maple syrup the plants can tap into for fuel, or store up energy over a few days for a few hours of light. The energy can come from somewhere else, but it does have to come form somewhere.

But yep - there are some basic laws of physics around energy expenditures that need to be taken into account here.

Plants can't grow LEDs?

Daylight is about 10k times brighter than twilight, so the plants would not need to output much energy compared with what they get during the day. The human eye is non-linear.

https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/light-level-rooms-d_708.h...

This reminds me of the $40 I gave to a kickstarter project 6 years ago to get seeds for a glowing plant made by a team of researcher at Stanford. I'm still waiting for my seeds, i believe the team has been disbanded since...

Here is the kickstarter project: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/antonyevans/glowing-pla...

ps: t

At least in they project the plant would glow forever. In this project they add the reactives submerging the leaves in a liquid with nanoparticles that have the reactives, so it locks like they will glow only once.

Also, in spite of the photoshoped tree and the photo that has the brightness so high that the noise level is evident

> The light generated by one ten centimetre (four inch) watercress seedling is currently about one-thousandth of the amount needed to properly read by, but it was enough to illuminate the words on a page of John Milton's Paradise Lost.

this generates a tiny amount of light, don't expect to use it to illuminate the streets like they hope in the article.

They (Taxa Biotechnologies) also raised money on WeFunder, where I invested a little bit. They switched from glowing arabidopsis to glowing tobacco plants because of problems with the genetic engineering, then pivoted to moss engineered to generate scents. Then they ran out of runway and that was that

I'm still fond of the idea, even it was only ever going to produce a relatively weak decorative glow. I'm sure it will pop up again in some startup eventually, now that we have CRISPR.

header photo: blindingly bright tree, woe betide those who look directly upon it

first paragraph: trees will someday light our highways

halfway down the article: okay, a book being lit by a plant, cool

near the end: "The light generated [...] is currently about one-thousandth of the amount needed to properly read by"

If you inject glowing nanoparticles into a watercress, the glowing nanoparticles will continue to glow.

You can also inject them into hotdogs. Or, for that matter, just about anything.

Am I missing something?

A little bit. Your hotdog would have to be alive. These nanoparticles are the enzymes and substrates for a luciferin reaction, which uses the plant's energy in the form of ATP to power the reaction, giving off light.

Injecting is the first phase. In the second one you make the plant produce the nanoparticles itself.

This is definitely cool, but If every tree were to glow, there is a possibility of interfering with nocturnal habits of birds and other animals.

That first picture seems misleading. At risk of stating the obvious, it seems to have a lamp shining on the tree from behind. I mean, the tree has a shadow going towards the camera...

Off topic: this website is unreadable without ad-block

Yes. Just about to say the same thing. I just clicked back and came to the comments hoping someone would explain what the content is all about.

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