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Hopefully they engineer the plants so that the seeds only germinate through some human means, that way they don't spread unmanaged and fuck up ecosystems. But very cool idea.
There’s an American company doing similar, a couple years ago I had some sort of flowering plant that glowed, I think it was a petunia, it was awesome but I’m not great at keeping plants alive.
Replacing street lamps is a hilarious fantasy though. They glow enough to look fucking awesome but not enough to see.
if you just need to see where the right-of-way is some dimly glowing stuff can replace streetlights
That’s true, they could help with that. Not enough to light the street, but enough to show you where the street isn’t.
I need this in my life.
Pretty old news, these were some of the first experiments with gene editing being done quite awhile ago, maybe over a decade. They've even made glowing animals with the same techniques although those are not publicly available for purchase
how viable are they?
For lighting things nearby? Basically useless. For making super fucking cool botanical gardens? Extremely viable. It's also a great exercise in modifying the genes of plants in novel ways, which is in and of itself promising. Consider a plant that produces silk, or a plant that produces a complete protein as a crop, on top of the usual benefits like drought/disease resistance and increased yields.
what if you pergola it
Go look at the article, there's a video of the plants and you can see how much light they emit
Soy
Even if they dont give off great light, the aesthetics of a well cared for garden with glowing plants highlighting a path during dusk/night would be so fuckin cool
They keep mentioning fertilizer in the article I assume they need a lot
No. They didn't. Those images are super over exposed. These plants only just barely glow and are nowhere even remotely close to being bright enough to provide any sort of meaningful light.
Creepy
There's a number of plant species with naturally occurring bioluminescence