firefly Genes spliced with Tobacco

[Patriotguy]

I was searching articles about splicing tobacco genes out of boredom and curiosity, found something pretty interesting where there existed tobacco plants that would glow. I think it would be amazing If we could ever propagate these for decoration, not sure what would happen if you tried smoking the leaves. I wasn't sure if anyone here had ever heard of or seen such a thing before.

"In total darkness the glow from the plants' leaves, stems and roots can be seen by eye, said members of the research group at the University of California in San Diego. The light emission becomes dramatically visible on photographic film exposed to the plants."



Sources:

TOBACCO PLANT WITH FIREFLY GENE IMPLANT GROWS (Published 1986)

www.nytimes.com

News

www.nsf.gov

 

[deluxestogie]

That research was published quite a while ago, and actually made local news broadcasts at the time. The concept uses visible light emission to indicate that a particular gene group has become active. It is still a workable idea, but far outdated by modern analytic methods and technologies. And producing photons costs the plant energy.

No Free Lunch: You may have noticed that if you use your cell phone for a flashlight, the battery charge runs out pretty quickly. If a tobacco plant expends some of its hard-earned sugars for generating celebratory light shows, that new allotment of the plant's energy has to be stolen from other accounts in its energy budget. The unpredictable shift in energy allocation means that—for research—the measurement method has already altered aspects of what it was intended to measure. Like a news reporter drawing his pistol, and jumping into the firefight.

Bob