Glowing Plants as Bright as a Light Bulb: Genetically Engineered Kickstarter Project (Video)

Bored of your typical nightlight? Don't want to turn on that power switch? It turns out that there may be an easier way to light up your homes without the use of electricity. A new Kickstarter project is aimed at creating glowing plants that are as bright as your average light bulb.

Seem a bit farfetched? It's not as unusual as you might think. There are many species that display bioluminescence, the ability to glow. There's the well-known firefly and many different ocean animals that can flash brightly in the dark. There are even mushroom species that can glow. In fact, the newest glow-in-the-dark fungus was discovered in the Brazilian rain forest, and can light up the forest floor.

Despite these species, though, there are currently no known plants that exhibit this type of bioluminescence. The latest Kickstarter project, though, hopes to remedy that. They plan to create a new synthetic species of plant by injecting parts of DNA drawn from glowing bacteria into the DNA sequence of the plant.

"What if we used trees to light our streets instead of electric street lamps?" asks Anthony Evans, one of the creators of the project, in the Kickstarter video.  "Inspired by fireflies and aquatic bioluminescence...our team of Stanford-trained PhDs are using off-the-shelf methods to create real glowing plants."

The project itself is actually the brainchild of Omri Amirav-Drory, a biochemist and founder of the synthetic biology venture Genome Compiler, along with Kyle Talor, a molecular biologist. Currently, the researchers are designing a method that relies on agrobacterium, a highly regulated plant pest. This agrobacterium can actually inject part of its genome into a plant, which will be crucial for creating the glowing plants.

So far, the Glowing Plant Kickstarter campaign has blown past its original monetary goal to raise $65,000 to get the project off of the ground. Currently, there's still more than a month to go before the project closes. Whether or not this will result in glowing trees or Avatar-style gardens remains to be seen.

Want to fund the project yourself? Check out the Kickstarter video and project here.