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Glow-in-the-dark Christmas Trees
lawrence writes "The BBC is carrying this story about five post-grad students at the University of Hertfordshire who are planning on creating a glow-in-the-dark christmas tree. They would do this by adding the genes that cause glowing in fireflies and jellyfish, making the pine-needles glow all the time. They expect the cost of the trees to be about £200 ($330) Future possibilities involve coral genes that would make it multicolored. " I think my favorite part about this story is the comment about Americans being a likely market. *grin*
GFP has also been used to create transgenic plants (and animals!) There are mice, for instance, that produce GFP in every cell in their body. This doesn't require as much energy as GFP is merely fluorescent (and this the fluorophore needs to be excited by external UV light), but this also makes it less attractive for the coolness factor.
If you're interested in this further, I highly recommend the book "Green Fluorescent Protein : Properties, Applications, and Protocols" by Martin Chalfie and Steven Kain (eds.). I've been reading through it quite a bit in lab, and it's a wonderful resource.
Anyway, I wish them luck in their rDNA endeavors, but I agree that they have their work cut out for them.
"A tan and skin cancer. You?"
"Knowledge = Power = Energy = Mass"
"I think my favorite part about this story is the comment about Americans being a likely market. *grin*"
Well, I'm still waiting for glow in the dark, multicolored lawn flamingos...
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
The glow? Feh. They've got jellyfish genes, so it'd be REALLY cool to give 'em tentacles. Right.
A glowing Christmas tree with stinging tentacles -- what better way to frighten the neighbor's dog?
{g}
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
If they can make mice glow, can reindeer be far behind?
--- If you don't want to know the answer, don't ask the question.
I'd like to see glow-in-the-dark shrubs along your driveway (so you can see at night). Glow-in-the-dark ivy would be interesting on building exteriors.
And why limit your gene splicing to plants? How fun would it be to have a glow-in-the-dark dog?
Anybody know if the chemicals responsible for phospholumenescence are toxic? If they're not, you can do really neat stuff. Glow-in-the-dark fruit could be the basis for easy-to-find midnight snacks and exotic resturaunt entrees. Better yet, glow-in-the-dark algae, making for glowing beverages.
and maybe a star on top and we'd be all set. Still, this sounds like the stuff bad horror movies are made of. Imagine if they'd develop intelligence and start devouring people. On the other hand, a grove of carniverous christmas trees just doesn't have a big scare factor.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
Glow in the dark children, so you know when they're sneaking around. Playing hide and go seek in elementary school would suck, though... "What's that light in the tunnel?! It's Bobby!! You're it!"
Actually, that is what they are doing.
Luciferase is an enzyme that reacts with a chemical called Luciferin to create light. The trees will have the genes to create the luciferase enzyme, but will still need a source of luciferin. The plan is to put luciferin in the water, and when a christmas tree sucks up the water into the leaves (Which it will still do after it has been cut), you can get the reaction.
I think my favorite part about this story is the comment about Americans being a likely market
Not to mention the Japanese, they love tacky stuff like that.
Mind you...they probably have enough glowing vegetation as it is.
This is all wrong though.Why resort to such unnatural methods when we could just dispense with the trees and hang luminous jellyfish around the house at Christmas instead.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Actually, the substance of plants is partially composed of carbons from the air. If you pour H2SO4 (sulphuric acid) over some sucrose, the mess will smoke and stink, and when the reaction is done, all that will be left is a bunch of carbon. Through radioactive tracers it has been proven that the carbon that winds up in the sugar originally was floating around in the form of CO2.
I'm guessing that other parts of plants are the same way, so the carbon in wood and leaves was originally part of atmospheric CO2. This carbon doesn't return to the atmosphere at least until the wood is burned or rotted by methane and CO2 producing bacteria. Forests are good carbon sinks, until the rate of growth of new forest is balanced by the rate of decay of dead leaves and wood, and then the forest is saturated with carbon. It can't hold any more.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
I'm sure I've missed a few wacky variations, so feel free to reply to this insert descriptive word here post!
Have a Merry Christmas with your light-up tree! Yeah, I know this is exactly two months early
Kenneth Arnold
Where's the HTML tag that makes my post not stupid?
Luciferase is a firefly gene that catalyzes the breakdown of the chemical luciferin, emitting light in the process. (Yellow light.) Fireflies "blink" by controlling the access of luciferase to luciferin. A plant isn't going to blink since it doesn't have the appropriate control machinery (e.g. no neurons to send a signal saying "turn on now"). But a plant could always simply glow steadily. Unfortunately, plants don't make luciferin, and normal luciferase doesn't catalyze anything in a normal non-firefly-light-organ cell. I presume that the postdocs have figured out a way to get around this.
Even stranger is the idea to use GFP. GFP (green fluorescent protein) is responsible for most of the neat pictures of glowing organisms that you're likely to see. However, what they don't tell you is that since it is fluorescent it requires violet or blue light as input. GFP absorbs violet or blue light, blah blah Stokes Shift blah blah, and emits green light. If you're going to shine blue light on your tree, why bother with all the confusing luciferase stuff and--if you want yellow--just include YFP as well (which works just like GFP except it emits yellow, or actually more chartreuse, light).
My guess as to what the group is really trying to do is this: find and use a luciferase-like gene that creates bioluminescence out of common cellular energy carriers, e.g. NADPH. Plants store the energy from sunlight in NADPH, so if you express this gene, they'd glow (at least during the day...). Furthermore, the reaction would ideally produce blue light. It's tough to get blue light out of a plant, because cholorphyll absorbs blue light. But if you tack on a GFP, it will convert the blue light to green and you'll be able to see it fine. Likewise for yellow with YFP. If you want orange or red, you can tack on both a GFP and a coral fluorescent protein, which will turn green light into an orangy color.
It makes a nice headline, but it sounds rather complicated to me. I wouldn't hold your breath for these trees.
Well, not only does the fact of owning a glowing Christmas tree scare the hell out of me, it also makes me think about how commercial Christmas is. We have commercials telling us to "the perfect gift" for mom/dad/sister/brother/neice/nephew/cat/dog/bird/f rog/rock and it's a pathetic waste of time. I mean, does a company actually care if your parents, etc. (see above for more examples) are happy with the gift they receive? Hell no, they just care that they make some gigantic product and you turn the wheel of the country's economy, and the latter isn't that common either.
So what can we do to stop this total insult to our intelligence one may ask, well, not buying the product is a solution, but how many people can safely say they will not buy it regardless? Not many, I presume. We're forced as the human species to fit in as best we can, especially the younger generations.
Listen up SlashDot readers, it's getting pathetic how this idea/story is actually commended by the public, it's a pathetic idea, and some things are just too traditional to try and change. This will not catch on, it will just sit there in the stockroom collecting dust for god knows how many years. Now, glowing underwear.. that's a different story.
Trying not to flame,
Matthew
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sortakinda.ca | canadian paraphrasing.
The BBC have an article up about this at This page
Pretty much the same as we know but its got a picture of a normal tree on it. Which is nice.
So, you have to power the tree somehow - Electricity or expensive fertilizer: you make the choice.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
If they're going to try to bring back mammoths, and are going to be a bit short on the DNA...
:-)
Anyone for glowing green mammoths?!
Mammoth 2000 - now in your choice of day-glo colors!
I'm holding out till they come with there own presents
"pull my finger" - Uncle Chuckles
America isn't more free just because Americans tell themselves over and over again that it is.
the war on drugs!!!!! and all its ramifications
religious right
crazy patent laws
creationists
lawsuit-o-mania
selective service
nutbar drinking age laws
no cuban cigars or cheap vacations
highest incarceration rate in the western world
3 strikes and "you're out"
bla bla bla
*ON THE OTHER HAND*: it's easy to think of ways America has got the drop on many other Western countries too
For example many European countries have - get this - an official list of names you can name your kids - not on the list, forget it! wierdness! *too* crazy!
[We don't come from a planet. We come from a grid sector.]
The gene in question (or something similar) is patched into E. coli all the time in HS and college biology classes. The resulting bacteria sit in a suspension and do not glow. Only when the flask is shaken do they glow, because that's the only time they get enough oxygen to metabolize enough energy.
A quick look at the average xmas tree configuration reveals:
1) The trees are cut and screwed into a base.
2) The screws puncture the phloem (or whatever it's called) that carries the actual nutrients.
3) In combination with these two factors, most trees are put in plain water, which has precious little energy in it.
Seems to me that any tree that's going to glow reasonably well is going to have to be at least in miracle-gro, and probably in something more special than that to get any real benefit.
Not only that, but these are first-run products. My guess is that people will buy them, set them up, wonder why they don't glow, call the company, get told to feed them something nutritious, and be disappointed when they only glow a little bit.
I won't deny the neatness factor of staying up until 1 in the morning and turning all the lights off for an hour so your eyes adjust enough to see your tree glow, but don't expect anything spectacular for your $300, folks!
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
"Mommy why is our tree covered in fireflies?"
With this great new idea, that tacky aluminum tree suddenly becomes obsolete.
Or maybe Charlie Brown is obsolete, too, and it's time for something like After Y2K to come up with their own claymation christmas special, featuring a tree just like the one we're talking about.
In Thailand there's a species of fireflies
that flashes in sync. It's really amazing to see these bugs at night.
How about engineering those babies to take the cold?
I love Christmas the family time, but I hate Christmas the overcommercialized holiday. I could probably attempt to write a lengthy diatribe about how America is too commercialized, the forgetting of the genuine meaning behind important holidays, materialism, and public gullibility, but I should probably start making my shopping list...
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In a real emergency, we would have all fled in terror, and you would not have been notified.
"Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter."
when do I get to glow in the dark?
Insert mind here.
Not only is it possible, it has been done.
This particular technology is not new.
Almost 10 years ago, firefly genes were grafted into tobacco plants (I believe it was at the University of Waterloo, but I'm not positive about that). I saw pictures taken of these plants in 1991. I'll try to come up with the journal cite for it.
Scientific expertise disagree on what impact genetically modified cristmas trees may have on the environment. The producers have been eager to point out that since the tree isn't supposed to be eaten, the effect on humans is most likely nil. Others are not quite that optimistic, and fears have been raised that the gene may spread from domesticated trees to their wild counterparts, possibly making entire forests glow continuously and thus upsetting the natural balance between day and night.
Meanwhile, reports from Russia suggest that another British invention, the allegedly UFO-made crop circles, is being exploited on a grand scale. Siberian hackers are suspected to have sown large amounts of modified conifer seed in a complicated arrangement forming graphics and letters, appearantly hoping to render a functioning encryption program visible on regular satellite photos from the area, thus making it globally available without violating national export legislation.