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Post by Dennis Z on Sept 1, 2014 10:35:03 GMT -5
www.glowingplant.com/I found it while doing some web surfing. Apparently scientists are now trying to replace street lights with bio-luminescent trees. As the result of experimentation, there are now glow in the dark plants.
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Post by Dennis Z on Sept 1, 2014 11:22:59 GMT -5
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Post by mabudon on Sept 1, 2014 11:37:13 GMT -5
I am sure you could make anything glow with the right process, the Soviets even found a way to make concrete glow for centuries (little Pripyat humour there)
Glowing CPs would be a terrible idea, people lose enough sleep over the non-glowing varieties, imagine if you could worry about them 24/7
Also, how would photosynthesis work?!?!?!
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Post by Raymond on Sept 1, 2014 11:54:18 GMT -5
Might be revolutionary This would be so cool if it can make the dew drops of Drosera glow. Reminds me of the alien plants you see in Science fiction
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Post by lloyd on Sept 1, 2014 13:44:17 GMT -5
When I was in the Amazon, at night when my eyes were dark adapted, I was amazed at the phosphorescent fungi.
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Post by sokkos on Sept 1, 2014 15:47:32 GMT -5
Might be revolutionary This would be so cool if it can make the dew drops of Drosera glow. Reminds me of the alien plants you see in Science fiction Something similar has been done before with D. rotundifolia: www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168945201005921I was actually talking to people at school earlier about this. We were talking about making the liquid in sarracenia and nepenthes pitchers glow. Our thought was perhaps we can use these plants to make pharmaceuticals and have the plant secrete the drugs into the liquid. An added benefit would be that the liquid is sterile before the pitchers open, so in theory you can extract it with a syringe before the trap opens and get sterile drugs to purify. Or we can use sundews to produce these meds then have the plant secrete it in its dew so it's easy to collect. Easier said than done (won't go into details here) and I don't see anyone willing to fund this research, but it's definitely very cool! I sort of got excited and rambled on a bit haha
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Post by canuk1w1 on Sept 2, 2014 18:36:02 GMT -5
In theory it is possible. What you'd be doing is transgenics using nepenthes as the vector. "All" you;d need to do is transplant a "glowing gene" from some organism into the Nep (or whatever plant you choose). SOP from there (screening for desired mutations, eliminating undesirables). I suspect they'll be extremely difficult - but with crispr and other new techniques this sort of thing will become routine sooner rather than later. Good idea what you're thinking but I reckon it'd be easier with yeasts or prokaryotes.
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Post by hal on Sept 2, 2014 20:17:42 GMT -5
I've got a can of paint that would do the trick.
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Post by sokkos on Sept 2, 2014 20:57:07 GMT -5
In theory it is possible. What you'd be doing is transgenics using nepenthes as the vector. "All" you;d need to do is transplant a "glowing gene" from some organism into the Nep (or whatever plant you choose). SOP from there (screening for desired mutations, eliminating undesirables). I suspect they'll be extremely difficult - but with crispr and other new techniques this sort of thing will become routine sooner rather than later. Good idea what you're thinking but I reckon it'd be easier with yeasts or prokaryotes. Definitely much much much easier to do these types of things with prokaryotes especially E. coli. The dilemma is although prokaryotes are easy to work with, the amount you need to grow to be able to extract a usable quantity of anything commercially is just too darn expensive (look at how expensive cancer antibodies are). Plants can (in theory) produce greater quantities. The problem with the Neps is you need to be able to regenerate them in tissue culture from leaf tissue and you need a transformation SOP that works. Neps have a ton of endogenous bacteria and fungi inside them and I've had 0 percent success with getting them in culture from leaves. The endogenous stuff could also interfere with your transformation protocol. It's not hard to figure these tissue culture things out through trial and error but it'll take time. What will be difficult to figure out is how to target the glowing molecule to be secreted into the pitcher specifically. The screening part is actually quite simple. You don't even need to include a marker (ie herbicide resistance) because you can visually screen all your plants and pick out the ones that glow. I was never really interested in molecular bio and still don't fully understand it (despite doing plant transformations the past few years) but this whole thing with using CPs to make drugs or glowing molecules really fascinates me!
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Post by canuk1w1 on Sept 4, 2014 18:46:46 GMT -5
Good point about the endogenous microorganisms in neps. Re: targeting, just introduce the new gene at the same locus as the existing digestive pitcher genes. I imagine you'd impair production of other enzymes as well due to consumption of substrates for the new protein(s). It'd also be much easier ethically to use GMO plants in the manufacture of proteins rather than GMO animals. Algae have shown promise in the manufacture of lots of things including biodiesel. Pretty sure there are some naturally occurring forms that phosphoresce. GMO algae in symbiosis with nepenthes perhaps?
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Post by Dennis A(cook1973) on Sept 4, 2014 19:01:48 GMT -5
where can I get the stuff your on??
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Post by sokkos on Sept 4, 2014 19:43:59 GMT -5
Good point about the endogenous microorganisms in neps. Re: targeting, just introduce the new gene at the same locus as the existing digestive pitcher genes. I imagine you'd impair production of other enzymes as well due to consumption of substrates for the new protein(s). It'd also be much easier ethically to use GMO plants in the manufacture of proteins rather than GMO animals. Algae have shown promise in the manufacture of lots of things including biodiesel. Pretty sure there are some naturally occurring forms that phosphoresce. GMO algae in symbiosis with nepenthes perhaps? As far as I know, there isn't a way to insert a gene into a specific location in the plant genome using the tools we have now. You are right in that the particular locus would contain sufficient information to localize the protein to where it needs to go if you only replace the sequence of the digestive enzyme with your protein of interest. Using the standard Agrobacterium-mediated transformation that we have, we would need to attach a signal peptide to our protein. Finding the signal peptide sequence would be difficult. The signal peptide is cleaved at some point and I don't believe it stays on the mature protein. That would mean you can't really determine the sequence from looking at the mature proteins that you extract from the plant. I presume you would need to do RNA work to figure it out which can be very very difficult and finicky to do. Re: substrate competition, you can use constitutive promoters to drive the sequence to make sure it is always produced. Things like the 35S promoter are pretty strong and can sometimes outcompete native promoters. You can also codon-optimize your sequence to maximize the translation rate, but you would need to know what the AT:CG ratio is. We are already using plants to produced therapeutic proteins. The ebola antibody cocktail is produced in a plant related to smoking tobacco. We use the same technique to produce a breast cancer drug and HIV antibodies. There is a company that is working on producing H5N1 vaccines in plants. We are definitely starting to move to plants instead of animal production systems, but doing this kind of work in plants is a totally different ballgame compared to using mammalian cells.
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Post by sokkos on Sept 4, 2014 19:50:02 GMT -5
I just realized they're selling Arabidopsis! To put into perspective the size of the plant (assuming it's a common lab strain), think along the lines of a D. rotundifolia or D. tokaiensis.
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Post by hal on Sept 4, 2014 22:36:36 GMT -5
I just looked up Arabidopsis. Very interesting. It was the first plant to have its full genome sequenced and is a model organism for plant biology. NASA wants to grow them on the moon next year and on Mars in 2021.
/you never know what you'll learn on the OCPS.
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Post by canuk1w1 on Sept 5, 2014 16:58:47 GMT -5
Thx Sokkos! Makes me wish i'd stayed on and did grad work in molecular biology instead of heading to Bay street... Crispr seems to be able to address many of the issues with targetting specific loci in chromosomes: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPRI was thinking along the lines of appending the phosphorescent protein gene to the existing digestive protein sequence rather than substituting. Both would carry risks. Same way we used drosophila and saccharomyces as models for eukaryotic genetics (back in the day) they are using Arabidopsis. The science has advanced, and I'm dating myself...
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