OOOHHH Glow in the Dark Orchids!
 

Someone else on another board brought this to my attention. Im sure someone else has already heard of this.
Prof. Chia Tet Fatt from the National Institute of Education (NIE) has made glow in the dark orchids. He used firefly genes and put them into orchids, prob a dendrobium sp.. As a result he got orchids that glow green when it gets dark. The orchids use their own energy to become bioluminescent, and its the entire orchid, stalk, leaves, roots, flower and all that ligths up.
I wish we could all get one of these orchids as a halloween present.
Here is the link to the full article from The Central Missouri Orchid Society.
http://cmos.missouri.org/2003Dec14.htm

Tindo, I want one SOoooooooo much!!! SOoooooo much!!! Please be sure I know if you ever find them for sale where we can get them :c)

Gee I don't know if there is a market for this type of orchid yet. But maybe some day.

Oh, this is just grand!

Fireflies blink to attract a mate. Orchids do most of what they do to attract a pollinator. So when this new orchid shines like the Siren's beacon or was that the Grail Beacon... calling all fireflies; and some studdly dude obliges...the resulting offspring will then be capable of flight.

It's a whole new world...

Julie

:lol: :lol: :scratchhead: Flying orchids huh.
I don't want to have to cage them, all.
Seriously though, A while back I read that scientists are using genes called introns (parts of your DNA that are normally "cut" out before they get to do what genes do.) to make normally white flowers blue. I don't remember what plant they were using, but its ramifications were big. Everything from making all sorts of flowers to curing genetic diseases.:cheer:

If I understand it properly, it isn't introns they are using to turn the purple flowers white, but RNAi (inhibitory RNA). I think there was an episode of NOVA on it recently. Petunias, by the way. This is one of the most exciting things to hit molecular biology in a long time... Turns out there is a mechanism in all cells which recognizes a certain structure of double stranded RNA (it is usually single stranded), and chews it up. It is thought to be a mechanism to protect cells against viruses. The neat part is that we can use that system to effectively destroy all of the messages for a given gene. It is cheap, easy, and powerful as all getout.

Heavily oversimplified explaination, I can make it more complicated if you want... We are starting to use this in our lab, actually.

Of course the downside to this is that you can only knock out genes, not knock them in. So, if you want your plants to glow, and there isn't some gene preventing them from glowing, this technology won't help you. But, it is pretty easy to add new genes to plants, too (the technology used to make the glowing orchids is widely used for other plants).

Yea, you got it. But isn't RNAi, RNA based on introns? I think thats where I got confused. Thanks for the explanation. And yea, maybe I would like a deeper explanation. I love this stuff.
So do you use viruses to introduce new genes?
Thanks.

By the way, great Avatar!!!!

No, RNAi is against mRNA, which has already had its introns spliced out... Might be something else you are thinking of.

There is a good summary here:
http://fig.cox.miami.edu/~cmallery/150/gene/siRNA.htm

Yes, to get DNA into plant cells we can use viruses. One of them is Agrobacter tumefaciens, which I think forms tumors (galls) naturally on some plants. Or, a bunch of other ways... Since plant cells have tough cell walls, some of the techniques I normally use (I'm an animal person) don't work. But there are gene guns that fire DNA coated gold particles into cells, those will punch through a cell wall.

Thanks for the correction, and thanks for the link. I will read up.

My gene gun is bigger than your gene gun.