In a couple years, if you’re at the florist and are trying to decide between red roses or yellow roses, you might have the choice to, well, not choose: Synthetic biologists are working on making flowers that change colors throughout the day, coordinated with the plant’s internal circadian rhythm.
It’s a project that’s reminiscent of the glow-in-the-dark plants that biohackers have created in the lab, except the scientists working on it say that they hope to create a product that the layperson can inherently understand and will want to buy at their local flower shop. It’s synthetic bio for your mom—or for people who might be a bit freaked out by synthetic bio in general.
So, in that spirit, Havens and her colleague, Nikolai Braun, have chosen to create petunias that change color every 12 hours. Rather than plucking a gene from a glow-in-the-dark bacteria or some other creature with a desirable trait, the team simply has to use a gene from another species of petunia.
If you didn’t realize that the flowers are genetically engineered, you probably wouldn’t see them and immediately think of them as “mutants.” Which is the point.
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In that sense, it might be a little less scary to the anti-GMO crowd: Botanists have been crossbreeding and hybridizing plants for centuries—Havens and Braun are doing it in a laboratory, with a bit of circadian trickery, of course.
Read the full, original story: Will people actually buy color changing, biohacked flowers?
