Leafy Lighting

摘要

Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden glow? Missouri-based molecular biologist Alexander Krichevsky knows. He's engineered light-generating plants reminiscent of the foliage in the film Avatar. Most bioluminescent organisms, including fireflies, get their glow from a chemical reaction between the enzyme luciferase and a molecule called luciferin. Scientists have tried to re-create the effect in plants before: In the 1980s, researchers added a firefly's luciferase gene into tobacco plant cells. But the plants grown from those cells didn't produce luciferin and needed an external spritz of it in liquid form just to give off a weak, temporary glow.