Tag Archives: arabidopsis

Plants that glow in the dark; Kickstarter campaign or public relations campaign?

Synthetic biologists have set up a Kickstarter campaign, Glowing Plants: Natural Lighting with no Electricity, designed to raise funds for a specific project and enthusiasm for  synthetic biology in the form of plants that glow in the dark. As of this morning (May 7, 2013, 9:50 am PDT), the campaign has raised $248, 600. They’ve met their initial goal of $60,000 and are now working towards their stretch goal of $400,000 with 30 days left.

Glowing Arabidopsis

Glowing Arabidopsis

Ariel Schwartz in her May 7, 2013 article for Fast Company describes the project this way,

Based on research from the University of Cambridge and the State University of New York, the Glowing Plants campaign promises backers that they’ll receive seeds to grow their own glowing Arabidopsis plants at home. If the campaign reaches its $400,000 stretch goal, glowing rose plants will also become available.

“We wanted to test the idea of whether there is demand for synthetic biology projects,” explains project co-founder Antony Evans. …

Kickstarter backers will get seeds created using particle bombardment. Gold nano-particles coated with a DNA construct developed by the team are fired at plant cells at a high-velocity. A small number of those particles make it into the Arabidopsis plant cells, where they’re absorbed into the plant chromosomes.

Arabidopsis was chosen for a number of reasons: it’s not native to the U.S., so there is little risk of cross-pollination; it doesn’t survive well in the wild (again, reducing risk of cross-pollination), it self-pollinates, and up until recently, it was thought to have the shortest genome of any plant. That means the protocols for Arabidopsis plant transformation work are well-established. Roses (the stretch goal plant) have also been studied extensively, and they carry little risk of cross-pollination, according to Evans.

As Schwartz notes, the project has potential for future applications,

In the meantime, Evans and his team plan on spending the next year on the campaign. Eventually, Evans imagines that the Glowing Plants creators will work on bigger glowing plant species, so one day they could even be used for street lighting.

Here’s more about the team behind this Kickstarter campaign (from the project page, click on Antony Evans),

Omri Amirav-Drory, PhD, is the founder and CEO of Genome Compiler, a synthetic biology venture. Prior to starting his company, Omri was a Fulbright postdoctoral research fellow at Stanford University School of Medicine and HHMI, performing neuroscience research using structural and synthetic biology methods. Omri received his PhD in biochemistry from Tel-Aviv University for biochemical and structural studies of membrane protein complexes involved in bio-energetics.

Antony Evans has an MBA with Distinction from INSEAD, an MA in Maths from the University of Cambridge and is a graduate of Singularity University’s GSP program. He is both a Louis Frank and Oppidan scholar and worked for six years as a management consultant and project manager at Oliver Wyman and Bain & Company. Prior to this project he co-founded the world’s first pure mobile microfinance bank in the Philippines and launched a mobile app in partnership with Harvard Medical School.

Kyle Taylor was born and raised in the great state of Kansas, where his love of plants evolved out of an interest in the agriculture all around him. This lead him to major in Agriculture Biochemistry and minor in Agronomy at Iowa State University and then pursue a PhD in Cell and Molecular Biology at Stanford University. Not too bad for a rural country boy! Since a lot of people helped him get to this point, he’s driven to share his passion and excitement by making what he does more accessible. Kyle teaches Introduction to Molecular Cell Biology at Biocurious and is our resident plant expert.

This project reminded me of artist Eduardo Kac (pronounced Katz) and his transgenic bunny, Alba. She glows/ed green in the dark. Here’s more from Kac’s ‘transgenic bunny’ webpage,

My transgenic artwork “GFP Bunny” comprises the creation of a green fluorescent rabbit, the public dialogue generated by the project, and the social integration of the rabbit. GFP stands for green fluorescent protein. “GFP Bunny” was realized in 2000 and first presented publicly in Avignon, France. Transgenic art, I proposed elsewhere [1], is a new art form based on the use of genetic engineering to transfer natural or synthetic genes to an organism, to create unique living beings. This must be done with great care, with acknowledgment of the complex issues thus raised and, above all, with a commitment to respect, nurture, and love the life thus created.

Alba, the fluorescent bunny. Photo: Chrystelle Fontaine

Alba, the fluorescent bunny. Photo: Chrystelle Fontaine

She never looks quite real to me. Under a standard light, she’s a white rabbit but glows when illuminated by a blue  light.  From Kac’s transgenic bunny page,

She was created with EGFP, an enhanced version (i.e., a synthetic mutation) of the original wild-type green fluorescent gene found in the jellyfish Aequorea Victoria. EGFP gives about two orders of magnitude greater fluorescence in mammalian cells (including human cells) than the original jellyfish gene

I don’t know if she still lives but Kac was creating work based on her up until 2011. You can find more here.

ETA June 12, 2013:  Anya Kamenetz has written a followup June 12, 2013 article for Fast Company about this Kickstarter project (Note: A link has been removed),

Though the project is technically legal, its sheer hubris has kickstarted some serious from scientists and environmental groups that object to the release of these seeds to the public, with the chance that the DNA will get into the natural gene pool with unknown consequences. An anti-synthetic bio group called ETC has started a fundraising drive of their own, dubbed a “Kickstopper.”

There’s also an online petition according to Kamenetz. One comment, her description of ‘ETC’ as an anti-synthetic bio group doesn’t quite convey the group’s scope or depth. It’s name is the ETC Group (Action group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration) and its tag line is ‘monitoring power, tracking technology, strengthening diversity.

ETA August 16, 2017: I have an update for the Kickstarter project and additional information about Alba in an Aug. 16, 201 posting.