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Our current prototype is way brighter than the 80's project. About 1,000 times. It's still dim and needs to be viewed in a dark room, but it's very visible to t
by technotony 12y ago
Our current prototype is way brighter than the 80's project. About 1,000 times. It's still dim and needs to be viewed in a dark room, but it's very visible to the naked eye which others glowing plants aren't. We've still continuously improving it with a long way to go to realize our full vision. Wall Street Journal took this picture of it last week, I don't believe anyone has ever recorded reflection from such a plant before: http://postimg.org/image/8wmx7rl29/ http://postimg.org/image/8wmx7rl29/
(note that this is a 30 second exposure with a 4,000 iso)
- dekhn 12y agoum, 30 second exposure with 4000 ISO can take pictuers in near absolute dark without a light (I do microscopic photography).... but OK. Is this enough to actually illuminate things more than 10 feet away? Do you have an idea of what the max achievable illumination (quantum efficiencysurface areaflorophore denstiy)?
- technotony 12y agoWe need a lot more work to get it bright enough to illuminate other object to the naked eye, but we are working on that! DNA isn't like code where you write it and are confident about how it works. We have to test a lot of different designs to see which works best which is a long slow process of incremental improvement.
- dekhn 12y agoSure... I have a PhD in biophysics and the thing that got me into it was a picture of a glowing tobacco plant on the cover a book. I'm curious because 20+ years ago I assumed that glowing plants would be solving world hunger, or something. But in grad school they beat all the synthetic biology out of me because it didn't get NIH grants. It's not really clear to me this has a use. It's neat from a technology perspective, but like glowing yogurt, I struggle to see this being a clear improvement over conventional lighting systems.
- justinsb 12y agoThat is encouraging though: this doesn't get NIH grants, so it hasn't been pursued academically. Thus a group that is able to pursue it, because they got funding from an alternate source (Kickstarter), would be more likely to achieve good results. Indeed, it sounds like they are already 1000x better. If they can get another 1000x, I would wager it'd be a lot more useful than glowing yogurt.
- lotsofmangos 12y agoThere might not be many sensible uses of this technology, but sense doesn't dictate if there is a market. Give it a few years and there could well be plantations of glowing christmas trees causing chaos by utterly confusing the local wildlife.
- technotony 12y agoWe started this project to show people that you don't have to do research like this in an academic lab and be dependent on NIH funding. The more projects like this that happen, the more we can reduce the barriers to starting there will be an exponential take off on the kinds of things that can be done. We are so dependent on plants for so many things that this will undoubtably solve some other problems as well. Plus maybe we can make plants for lighting villages in Africa or for marking the side of the road in Canada.
- aroch 12y agoThere's a reason NIH doesn't fund stuff like this, its useless. A mere novelty. Say what you will about studies of syphilis in the prostitutes of Tijuana, they provide great data about infectious diseases. Super-GFP or Super-Cherry in E. coli˚ glows bright enough to see in ambient light (ie. my lab bench) -- Glowing plants solves essentially 0 real world problemsproblems.
- dekhn 12y agoHope is not a strategy. I admire your enthusiasm, but I am skeptical that your plans will have an impact. Regarding showing people you don't need an academic lab. Well, sure: I could, if I wanted, clone a gene in my garage if I had the time (since I've done it in a lab, it's pretty easy; none of the science of cloning e coli genes is hard, plants are far harder to transform). The funding isn't an issue either because, frankly, contract research labs clone genes affordably (I'm assuming a Bay Area software engineer salary permitting maybe $20-30K opcost and 100 hours/years labor). Personally, I think just focusing on developing a general purpose technology for plant transformation would get you further and faster towards your goal. Gene guns are lame.
- dnautics 12y agoCan you answer this question directly? Do you have an idea of what the max achievable illumination (quantum efficiency; surface area; florophore denstiy)?
- technotony 12y agoIt would be guess work at this stage as there are many many unknowns: eg how much can we improve photosynthesis? how much can we improve the base metabolic processes of the plant chassis? What about the efficiency of the energy storage process? These are very early questions which synthetic biology doesn't have the answers to yet.
- dnautics 12y agoyou yourself are not going to be improving photosynthesis; people have been trying that for years. But feel free to be liberal. Assume the theoretical maximum 10% photosynthetic conversion. Give ball-park optimistic numbers that are literature precedented maxima (for example how well C3, C4, and CAM plants store energy)... Isn't it irresponsible to be doing this without even a back-of-the-envelope calculation? Even an order-of-magnitude estimate should be relatively easy with a cursory amount of literature/biology textbook research. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem