Lamp in a flower pot
Russian scientists have received the first fully glowing plants
Sergey Vasiliev, Naked Science
Bioluminescence is quite widespread in fungi and marine plankton, but it does not occur in real plants in nature. Geneticists have been trying to create them for decades: such plants could, for example, serve as "living sensors", reacting to the appearance of pollutants, or even lighting devices that do not require connection to the power grid.
Unfortunately, while such plants are not viable enough, and the brightness and duration of their glow leave much to be desired. Therefore, all more or less successful projects of creating "living light bulbs" and "living sensors" use simpler organisms – fungi and bacteria. A new major success in this field is reported in an article published in the journal Nature Biotechnology (Mitiouchkina et al., Plants with genetically encoded autoluminescence).
A significant work was done by a large team of Russian scientists from the Shemyakin and Ovchinnikov Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences together with colleagues from the startup Planta LLC. According to them, they managed to achieve an order of magnitude brighter and more stable glow than all previous similar projects. To do this, the teams of Karen Sargsyan and Ilya Yampolsky used ordinary tobacco plants – and a rather unusual bioluminescence system, only recently discovered in fungi.
Some Neonothopanus basidiomycetes glow by conducting biochemical reactions in their cells using caffeic acid. To do this, through the mediation of a pair of enzymes, its molecules turn into luminescent precursor molecules, and then, with the help of another protein, they can be oxidized with the emission of photons.
However, if caffeic acid plays only a highly specialized role for fungi, then in plants it serves primarily as a precursor of lignin, a key polymer of solid cell walls, therefore it occurs very widely – in all representatives of the kingdom.
Therefore, after scientists modified and transferred the genes of the "coffee" bioluminescent system into tobacco plants, they began to glow green steadily and without interruptions, with a peak at wavelengths of 500-550 nanometers.
As one might expect, actively growing areas radiated the most intensively – the transition zone between the stem and root, as well as young shoots and buds, flowers and leaves. The "adult" tissues gradually faded, but luminescence continued in younger areas throughout the life of the experimental plants. There were no "side effects" from such innovations.
The authors used tobacco – one of the classic model organisms, easy to manipulate and fast-growing. However, they are confident that such a technology can be successfully applied to ordinary home and garden plants. Startup Planta LLC plans to commercialize such products.
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