Replacing street lights with glowing trees: a tale of crowdsourced DIY bioengineering.

• Author: Beato, Greg

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HOW MANY do-it-yourself bioengineering enthusiasts does it take to change a light bulb? Apparently 8,433. That's how many individuals backed the Glowing Plant Project on the crowdfunding website Kick-starter earlier this year.

Spearheaded by two biologists and a former Bain & Company management consultant, the Glowing Plant Project has at least two goals. Long-term: creating trees that glow so powerfully through bioluminescence that they can function as street lights. Short-term: promoting grassroots innovation within the realm of synthetic biology. You no longer have to be Monsanto to hack Mother Nature.

The quest for irrigatable illumination has been going on since the mid-1980s, when researchers first successfully transplanted a gene present in fireflies into tobacco plants. By now you'd expect to see phosphorescent Marlboros casting an eerie glow in what few dive bars still allow smoking, but progress has been slow.

Things sped up last year after former Bain consultant Antony Evans watched biologist Omri Amirav-Drory give a presentation on the possibilities of using living organisms to produce energy, fuel, plastics, and fertilizers. Evans was inspired by Amirav-Drory's suggestion that armchair tinkerers, utilizing sophisticated but easy-to-use software and a "biological app store," might one day assemble the genetic material for producing a "renewable, self-assembled, solar-powered, sustainable streetlamp"--in other words, a bioluminescent oak tree.

While glowing oaks currently exist only in the imaginations of visionary scientists, lesser life forms have already gone through a couple of tangible upgrades. In 2010, for example, a group of U.S. scientists created a tobacco plant that produced light autonomously. (The 1980s version required the exogenous application of a compound called luciferin.) That same year, in England, another group of scientists produced bacteria that glowed with enough intensity to read by or function as emergency signage.

The technology, in short, was ripe for further investigation. So when Evans encountered Amirav-Drory at another event, the two men started talking about using the biologist's Genome Compiler software to develop an actual product instead of merely hinting at the possibility in Power Point presentations. It would be something less ambitious than a luminous oak, but ideally brighter than glow-in-the-dark tobacco.

According to the U.S. Department of Energy, there are 26.5...