SCIENTISTS TARGET PLANTS FOR AUTO-BIOLUMINESCENCE THROUGH GENETIC ENGINEERING

SCIENTISTS TARGET PLANTS FOR AUTO-BIOLUMINESCENCE THROUGH GENETIC ENGINEERING

Figure: Taken from (Mitiouchkina et al., 2020)

How would you feel at night, if you are sitting in sofa or bed without turning on lights of your room? You would definitely feel fear from darkness of the room in night. And how would you feel, if the environment of your room become fragrant and glowing with bioluminescence of beautiful little plant-flowers and leaves? Abruptly you shall say, what???? It is impossible; how plants can glow in dark? If you think so, then I am here to tell you that now scientists have make it possible for plants to illuminate in dark. Yes, it is possible and let’s see how scientists from Russia, the United Kingdom and Austria have done it intelligently?

Before going into the depth of, how plants glow? First, we need to know that what bioluminescence is? Is there any creature(s) that can make appearance glowing with bioluminescence? What causes the creature to glow in dark? And how scientists became successful to make plants glow? Let’s see all of these, step-by-step, with me.

What bioluminescence is?
As you all know, what does “bio” means is “life” and luminescence “glow or produce light”. Taken together, we can define bioluminescence as “glow or light produced by living organisms as a result of chemical reactions taking place in their bodies”.

Which organisms can glow naturally? And how they produce bioluminescence?

There are a lot of organisms which can glow or produce light in the dark. If you have encountered any glowing fly, may be in your childhood or recent time, then there are more than 90% changes that the glowing fly that you encountered was firefly. In addition to fireflies, thousands of organisms living in oceans e.g., coelenterates (organisms which feed of water), dinoflagellates (one-celled organisms living in water bodies), bacteria, fungus and a lot of known, including fish and unknown organisms.

These organisms contain an enzyme generally known as luciferase; which catalyzes the breakdown of an intermediate peroxy-luciferin-luciferase complex; breakdown of this complex provides energy of excitation and that energy is released as photon of light. The chemicals (proteins) which release this energy are different in different organisms like yellow fluorescent protein (YFP) in bacteria and green fluorescent protein (GFP) in coelenterates.

How scientists became successful to make plants glow?

Dr Ilia V. Yampolsky, (Russia) and Karen S. Sarkisyan (UK) both are affiliated with Planta LLC, Moscow, Russia and Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry, Russian Academy of Science, Moscow, Russia. These scientists lead the study and successfully engineered the tobacco plants for auto-bioluminescence. Previously, they were investigating Neonothopanus nambi, a fungus, for its bioluminescence pathways and found that caffeic acid cycle (CAC) of this fungus is responsible for bioluminescence. As caffeic acid is also present in plants and involved in lignin production through phenylpropanoid pathway. So, they got the idea of employing some of fungal CAC-enzymes in plants to run a CAC analogous to fungal CAC.

Scientists used genetic engineering -a very famous and robust technique of biotechnology – to transfer four N. nambi bioluminescence genes: nnluz (luciferase), nnhisps (hispidin synthase), nnh3h (hispidin-3-hydroxylase) and nncph (caffeoyl pyruvate hydrolase) into the tobacco plant genome. These genes produced their respective enzymes in plants without any toxic effects and converted the caffeic acid to bioluminescence producing intermediate complex. The breakage of this intermediate complex, ultimately released light photons which made plants to glow in dark and this bioluminescence was also observed by naked eye too.

Video Clip: Supplementary video of  (Mitiouchkina et al., 2020)

How scientists transferred the genes from fungus to plants?

Genetic engineering is a biotechnology technique in which scientists take a piece of DNA (deoxy-ribo-nucleic acid) from one organism and transfer (integrate) it to other organism’s DNA. This can be done by two methods, biolistic-gene-gun method and agrobacterium-mediated gene transfer method.

In the first method, ready to use DNA is coated on gold or any other non-reactive metal nano-particles and these nano-particles are then bombarded to transfer the DNA in to plant tissue. And in second method, ready to use DNA is inserted into a plasmid which can be easily transferred to the agrobacterium. Agrobacterium is a type of bacteria which infects the plants and integrates its DNA into the plant genome randomly.

In this study, scientists used agrobacterium-mediated-gene transfer method for all four genes. Scientists observed and captured pictures and recorded videos at different stages of tobacco plants. Genetically modified tobacco plants have shown bright luminescence leaves, stems and roots, in early stages of plant life and then in flowers stage too.

Future of glowing plants

Glowing plants can have many scientific and daily life implications.

• Scientists believe that by enabling autonomous light emission, dynamic processes in plants can be monitored.
• Furthermore, developmental stages of plants and pathogenesis can also be investigated.
• Additionally, the details of plant responses to several environmental conditions and effects of different chemical treatments can also be investigated in future.
• Scientists also believe that small indoor plants can also be engineered to glow in dark and can be used to lite up the side tables in the room for several purposes.
• Glowing trees can also be used as natural street lights rather than electrical street lights or glow our homes.

Author’s Information
Muhammad Numan has summarized and written article of journal Nature Biotechnology.

Figures & Video information

All the figures and videos used in this article are published in nature biology and have properly cited in article.

References: All the resources which are used to write this article are given in this section.

• Mitiouchkina, T., Mishin, A. S., Somermeyer, L. G., Markina, N. M., Chepurnyh, T. V., Guglya, E. B., ... & Chekova, S. V. (2020). Plants with genetically encoded autoluminescence. Nature Biotechnology, 1-3.              
• Wilson, T., & Hastings, J. W. (1998). Bioluminescence. Annual review of cell and developmental biology, 14(1), 197-230.   
• Kotlobay, A. A., Sarkisyan, K. S., Mokrushina, Y. A., Marcet-Houben, M., Serebrovskaya, E. O., Markina, N. M., ... & Petushkov, V. N. (2018). Genetically encodable bioluminescent system from fungi. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(50), 12728-12732.
• Baltes, N. J., Gil-Humanes, J., & Voytas, D. F. (2017). Genome engineering and agriculture: opportunities and challenges. In Progress in molecular biology and translational science (Vol. 149, pp. 1-26). Academic Press.