Glowing Plants: Natural Lighting with no Electricity | Hacker News Reader

Glowing Plants: Natural Lighting with no Electricity

kickstarter.com

47 pointsmhb23 comments

I only have a layman's understanding of bioluminescence, but I was under the impression that it:

1) Made the plants extremely frail and prone to die at the drop of a hat

2) Generated extremely faint light levels, to the point where someone specialized equipment is needed to see it.

3) Was usually generated by a short-burst chemical reaction in the organism that was triggered somehow (eg. shake, tap, etc.) and had a rather short chemical reaction life, after which it faded.

4) The organism required significant time and nutrients to regenerate the chemical 'glow cell'.

So, mark me as a skeptic this will produce anything particularly useful, but I like the idea.

I'd be rather interested to see any links to science papers on things that make any of (1)-(4) no longer an issue.

Here's the paper: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone...

> Indeed, when the fully grown, homoplastomic LUX-TrnI/TrnA plants were placed in a dark room, their glow was clearly seen after about 5–10 min of eye adjustment to darkness.

bright, I see, just like I remember. Still, looks promising~

This was a proof of concept to show that the plant would stay alive and could express these molecules.

The project posted an update to discuss how to improve the light output: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/antonyevans/glowing-plan...

Four things: 1. Codon optimization 2. Promotor selection 3. Metabolic engineering 4. Gene Copy numbers

This has been on HN before. EDIT: Here it is. Turn on showdead to see unfortunate over-enthusiastic support. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5596212)

It's cool to fund scientific noodling. I'm not sure this project really describes the current state of glowing plants, or the amount of work needed, adaquately. I guess that's a problem for people wanting bright glowing plants.

I'm also not sure if there's anything to know about the problems of glowing plants might face. Plants use light for a bunch of regulation; things that live in plants and trees use light for a bunch of their regulation. Having glowing plants risks screwing that up.

The project owners have a problem with communicating what they've actually done to a scientifically ignorant, fearful-of-anything-mentioning-DNA, public.

But yeah, glowing trees is probably cool

No hints about the excepted light output which leads me to believe that they intend only to make glowing plants that are mostly unsuitable for lighting purposes. Sure it might be neat in the same way that a lava lamp is neat, but it's still quite far from revolutionizing our lighting, which is what they'd most likely want you to believe.

Also promoting heavily the idea that "Biology is sustainable" is disingenuous at best.

He posted this earlier with a bunch of sockpuppet accounts saying short snippets like "wow!" "amazing!"; and he was clearly gaming the upvotes, an initial rush of them boosted it near the top just like this time.

I think this project is meant more as a proof of principle. You can't expect a new technology to jump straight to better then what is commercially available on day one. It can still hold a lot of promise for developing into something better then what is available today. (disclosure: I am roommates with the main guy behind this)

At the very bottom, he says he doesn't know, but don't expect it to replace a light bulb. More like glow-in-the-dark paint. But it is v1.

Good ol' Arabidopsis! I performed a similar transfection in university, adding blacklight-reactive proteins from jellyfish to A. Thaliana. Things to know:

Arabidopsis is small; in the lab, 10 cm is usual, though they can double this size. It also has a short seed-to-seed cycle; those facts, and the simplicity of the genome, were why it was chosen as the original botanical model organism.

It's a fun project and the biosynthetic pathway should eventually be viable in plants; it's reasonable to think we can achieve glow worm levels of illumination, perhaps higher with further breeding.

Very cool. Equally scary?

Ripple effects and unpredictable consequences as they (and other engineered plants and animals) inevitably find their way into nature and impact second and third level food chains and ecosystems.

Can't stop it - better to embrace and carefully manage - and the upside is of course enormous.

> impact second and third level food chains

glowing bacon? I'm in!

The New York Times discusses the different sides to this project today: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/08/business/energy-environmen...

Since producing light costs (large?) amounts of energy, I find it unlikely that glowing plants will outcompete their nonglowing brethren in the wild.

Doesn't the plant still need to produce energy to emit light? Won't that energy have to come from somewhere? Soil nutrients and water require energy to generate and transport.

You know plants get their energy from sunlight, right..?

Water is used in photosynthesis. Nutrients are required to support the plant so it can continue to grow and produce energy from the sun. The distribution of water has it's own energy hungry pitfalls. Fertilizer production and distribution also requires significant energy.

Water, fertilizer and maintenance costs are one of the big hindrances to making biofuels net energy positive.

I would like to see some kind of source for the claim that lighting creates as much CO2 as cars.

Lighting is 20% of global electricity: http://www.c2es.org/technology/overview/electricity

Plus the 1% of lighting which comes from Kerosene lamps add's a further 20% to this.

I don't know where you're getting that claim from your link. It suggests that in the US, residential lighting is .14 * .38 = 5.32% of electrical supply, commercial lighting is .07 * .36 = 2.52% of electrical supply, and industrial lighting is .22 * .26 = 5.72%, for a total of about 13.5%. As far as I can tell, your link does not break down global electrical use.

Your link further claims that electrical generation accounts for 34% of greenhouse gas emissions in the US, so .135 * .34 = 4.6% of all US greenhouse gas emissions in the US would be lighting-related.

Transportation accounts for 27% of all greenhouse gas emissions, and your link doesn't break down what percentage of that is "cars." But unless only 1/7th of transportation CO2 emissions are from cars, lighting doesn't exceed it, in the US.

I would be pretty happy if I could make a room in my house look like a scene from Avatar.

This is my housemates project, glad to see it doing so well. Way to go Antony.

It's really going to get interesting when somebody does a Kickstarter for splicing the THC gene into tomatos...

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