Glowing Potato Plants as Dryness Alert

dschuetz writes "Scientists in London (Reuters, on Excite) have developed a potato plant that faintly glows green when it needs water. The idea is to plant these as "sentinels" in a field of normal potatoes. A cool idea, but haven't we proven in the past that genetic modifications eventually spread from any openly planted crop to neighboring unmodified plants? Is there any real future for modified plants, or are we going to find some way to truly keep them isolated, genetically, from plants for consumption?" If you can have glowing christmas trees, why not potatoes, that's what I say.

Comments

Re:Isolation

[dmatos]

Okay, here's the (possible) solution to your GenEng problems:

Make the potato plants sterile outside of the laboratory. I'm pretty sure this is done for other types of modified organisms. There goes your worries about the modified genes getting out into the rest of the crop.

If the plants are glowing gently, it would be a fairly simple matter to manually remove the fifteen or twenty plants in a field, prior to harvesting. If you plant one or two of these plants separated from the rest of the crop by three or four feet, they would still be a good indicator of dry soil in the rest of the field, but easy enough to identify and remove before the rest of the field is harvested.

Of course, the same thing could be done with a bunch of hydrometers (sp?) - things that measure moisture. I have one for my plants at home. Just get a bunch of them and stick them into the ground around the field. Then, you don't have to worry about GM fears, and, you can re-use them from year to year. Why do some people have to over-complicate things.

That said, cool! I want glow in the dark plants in my house. It'd be much better than night-lights!

Re:Better yet

[Pentapod]

They tried that with roses... roses (or most plants, but roses are particularly sensitive) transport water from the roots up the plant in long columns (veins). Evaporation from the leaves pulls more water up, and pressure from incoming water below also pushes the water up; the water in the veins is therefore under tension. If the water is being lost from above faster than it can be replenished from below, e.g. if there's not a lot of water to be had below, the tension that the water is under eventually causes "cavitations", which is when a bubble of gas appears in the water in the vein.

Some smart dudes hooked up microphones to roses in a greenhouse and when the roses were subjected to water stress they could actually hear the cavitations appearing like pop-pop-popcorn. This would then either turn on the sprinklers automatically, or alert someone to turn on the sprinklers, depending on how high-tech they wanted to get.

So your plants really can talk to you!

Pentapod - (feed me, Seymore!)