Glowing plant project fails

[Koeng]

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/antonyevans/glowing-plants-natural-lighting-with-no-electricit/posts

I think we all saw this coming.

[John Griessen]

On 04/18/2017 08:29 PM, Koeng wrote:
> I think we all saw this coming.

Oh, I didn't think they would bomb that bad -- maybe just have plants
that faded after a few sexual reproduction cycles.

$484K spent without money to ship the main reward is pretty bad though.
At least they are going to lay off someone and ship something before the money is gone.

If only they had located their project down the street from Sebastian.
Probably would have had glowing moss graffiti last October and shipping glowing
leaf plants today.

[Cathal Garvey]

I feel that this project should never have even started, because it's
implausible even on physical grounds. But, having said that.. they
could have just declared it a "fail" and walked away, at least they're
still trying to deliver something that would interest their backers.

I'm not super hopeful, but it's better than nothing. I've got no "skin
in the game" though as I never backed the project to begin with.

Whatever hopes we ever had of getting Kickstarter to stop banning
bioscience projects is slimmer now, though; the credibility is burned
and there hasn't been as much advocacy to lift the ban as there was to
instate it.

For my part, I'll still never back something on Kickstarter as long as
the ban remains. They only introduced it at the behest of the
anti-science swarm, there is no rational basis to it.

--
@onetruecathal / @cat...@quitter.is


On Thu, Apr 20, 2017 at 5:49 PM, John Griessen <jo...@industromatic.com>
wrote:

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[Cas Smith]

Kickstarter's recent 'wish list' (Our Design & Tech Team’s ‘Request for Projects’, see: Boundary Pushers section) gives me hope that biotech/synbio/etc. will still be welcomed on their platform. They also recently hosted an event for the Biodesign Challenge. So...think positive thoughts (and advocate), I guess?

[David Murphy]

I'm honestly surprised it failed so totally. I was under the impression that they were basically replicating earlier work that made some very faintly glowing plants.

I expected them to end up shipping something you might just about be able to see glowing in a dark room and end up stuck on the problem of getting it brighter, not utterly bombing.

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[John Griessen]

On 04/22/2017 05:19 AM, David Murphy wrote:
> I expected them to end up shipping something you might just about be able to see glowing in a dark room and end up stuck on the
> problem of getting it brighter, not utterly bombing.
>

They say they will endure pain to ship moss with a smell. So they could be close to shipping something that glows.
They might still. I bet if you study all about it you will find high rent and high pay for employees slowing/stopping them.

[Abizar Lakdawalla]

Classic Philosophers dilemma "The less you know, the more confident you are" you will be able to deliver ...

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/diybio/CAP0RkBBYX-Af6yOe5xCx3E_Qc6%2BfpbB36HHR-LdwEqzBNKCj2w%40mail.gmail.com.

[a a]

They should have been able to- the earlier work was relatively very simple and easy to reproduce. I think they blew the money on hiring others and starting with mass-production instead of focusing on getting it working.

[Cory Geesaman]

Wow, so they're selling moss which smells like...moss?  This is revolutionary.

[Cory Geesaman]

I didn't know that ban existed, I definitely won't be backing any Kickstarters in the future.  On a separate note: why would the glowing plant concept be impossible?  Wouldn't it just require a bunch more food (like maybe a bath of sugar water to keep it running?)  It doesn't strike me as outright physically impossible - just a pain to get right.

On Thursday, April 20, 2017 at 1:00:37 PM UTC-4, Cathal Garvey wrote:

[Cathal Garvey]

Probably if you gave the plants external energy, they could hypothetically glow as bright as fungi do. But not at first: the pathways and systems needed for efficient transport of free sugar to the glowing bits probably just aren't there. Plants will have systems for transporting O2 and Glucose, sure, but at the scale/rate required? Probably not.

That's a guess, anyways. When I said it was implausible, I was referring to the idea of a fully autotrophic plant that could glow visibly to an unaided eye without requiring 30m of dark adaptation. Fungi can, bacteria can, animals can. But there are no autotrophs that can, even though the potential gains (nighttime pollinators) are definitely plausible. It's simply a numbers game: not enough energy.

--
Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.

[Cory J. Geesaman]

What would it take to take something like bioluminescent algae and break the switch which only activates it when agitated (so it always glows?)  Would it simply starve to death before it could ever reproduce or could that be fed from an external source?  On a related note, aren't there organisms which take in algae and keep them alive you might replace with that algae and somehow (big "if" on the "somehow," I know) get them to feed the algae sugar instead of CO2?

[Skyler Gordon]

It could be possible to use a CAM photosynthesis system coupled with your glowing process to insure that the glowing is only occurring at night instead of constantly. But the idea of putting that complex of a system into moss and having it function seems absurd.

-SG

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[Skyler Gordon]

You could try exporting the proteins. When they are extracellular you should be able to just feed the bacteria and supply the proteins with the necessary stuff to function (depending on if they stay folded correctly)

-SG