MIT creates ‘Avatar’-like plants that glow in the dark

These plants are glowin’ up.

Scientists at MIT have succeeded in creating plants that light up for hours at a time.

“The vision is to make a plant that will function as a desk lamp — a lamp that you don’t have to plug in,” Michael Strano, co-author of the study, recently published in NANO letters, said in a statement. “The light is ultimately powered by the energy metabolism of the plant itself.”

Researchers infused kale, watercress, argula and spinach with luciferase — the enzyme that makes fireflies glow. Then they dunked the plants in a solution containing more luciferase and luciferin — the molecule that reacts with luciferase to spark the light — and applied pressure. The pressure allowed the chemical mixture to sink into the plants’ tiny pores, where the luciferase and luciferin interacted to give the leafy green its glow.

The team made the plants glow for about 45 minutes in the first experiments. But by the time of the paper’s publishing, they reported greens that can glow for up to three and a half hours.

The watercress had an especially strong reaction to the chemical formula, producing a brightness comparable to half of a one-microwatt LED light.

The effort to engineer plants that light up isn’t new. In 2013, the Glowing Plant project raised nearly half a million dollars on Kickstarter but ultimately failed in their attempt to directly edit plant DNA. The team at MIT, whose research is funded the US Department of Energy, embedded the chemical into the plant rather than alter its DNA makeup.

While the work is still in the initial stages, scientists hope these plants will someday illuminate our books, homes and neighborhoods, with the idea that they might eventually replace streetlights.

“Plants can self-repair, they have their own energy and they are already adapted to the outdoor environment,” Strano said. “We think this is an idea whose time has come.”