One of the most popular Kickstarter launches of the last several years was the Glowing Plant Kickstarter campaign, which raised nearly half a million dollars in 2013 to create a genetically-engineered plant that could glow in the dark. But the glowing plants promised to backers never appeared.
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In order to make a glowing plant, they needed to insert several genes normally found in bioluminescent bacteria into their Arabidopsis plant’s genome. The team was never able to get all the necessary genes in at the same time, and they only got the plant to glow dimly. It wasn’t a shippable product.
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Creating scented moss was a more reasonable goal for the Taxa team, since moss is much less complex than the Arabidopsis plant the team used for the glowing plant project. It also has a simpler genome and a shorter life-cycle, which cuts down the time it takes to do experiments.
Taxa started working on scented moss a year ago, and quickly came up with a working prototype.
The moss, which went on sale in mid-August, is available in three varieties: patchouli, linalool (a spicy and floral scent found in cleaning products), and geraniol (a rose-like scent found in mosquito repellant).
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. Read full, original post: One of the most controversial Kickstarter campaigns in history is dead — here’s the product that actually got made
