RE: [DIYbio] Glowing plants for sale "Starlight Avatar"

[Sebastian Cocioba]

Cheaply?

The gene synthesis, planning, equipment, not to mention a PDS-1000/He, etc.

Its not an agro transformation. Its gold down the drain and a kidney or two's worth of trial and error.

Sebastian S. Cocioba
CEO & Founder
New York Botanics, LLC
Plant Biotech R&D

---

From: Koeng
Sent: 1/23/2014 10:23 PM
To: diy...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [DIYbio] Glowing plants for sale "Starlight Avatar"

http://stores.ebay.com/Bioglow-Auction

God someone wants one of these things. 400$ FOR A PLANT! That is outrageous considering how cheaply you can make them!

On Thursday, January 16, 2014 9:38:03 AM UTC-8, Mike Horwath wrote:

Female-sterile (no viable seeds) tobacco plants exist, maybe they are using those.  I don't think chloroplasts are normally transferred by pollen. This doesn't stop someone from propagating by cloning, however.

GloFish (with fluorescent genes) are also "no intential breeding allowed."  However, home aquarists can and do breed them.  I'm not aware of anyone getting prosecuted, and there's no way to track people doing it if they don't self-publicize.  To me this seems the most likely scenario for the BioGlow plants.

As to why have this policy...profit!  They are betting that lots of people will want these plants, not just serious DIYers and researchers.  They stand to make a lot more if every individual plant needs to be purchased from them.

Mike


On Wednesday, January 15, 2014 8:52:50 PM UTC-5, Sebastian wrote:

I really doubt someone would come after you for planting the resulting seeds. The tobacco plant makes thousands of seeds that literally spill out. It would actually be hard to ensure it won't fall into the soil and sprout new shoots. I think he means for profit based multiplication as anything else would not harm their profits...unless of course they become so stringent that every individual plant is regulated and unauthorized propagation will be fully prosecuted. It seems like shooting yourself in the foot if you don't allow the customer to do as she wishes as long as its not generating profit, goodwill, publicity, of any kind.

Sebastian S. Cocioba
CEO & Founder
New York Botanics, LLC
Plant Biotech R&D

---

From: Koeng
Sent: 1/15/2014 8:36 PM
To: diy...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [DIYbio] Glowing plants for sale "Starlight Avatar"

It says in the terms and conditions that you can't multiply the plants in any way, and that the lifespan is 2-3 months

Who the heck would buy it if you can't even keep growing a few generations?

That's stupid. 


On Wednesday, January 15, 2014 2:31:52 PM UTC-8, Sebastian wrote:

I hear you on the whole patent issue and I see this as more of a
publicity stunt to get buzz around. Optimizing transgene expression in
anything else but tobacco and arabidopsis is going to take much longer
to tweak mainly due to regeneration time and the fact that he probably
optimized everything to work in N. tabacum. Coming from a few years of
experience with plant engineering I can say its not a simple task and
often involves scrapping weeks of work...like most projects in general.
If there is enough hype, his investors will be happy and continue
funding. This is just speculation but Im sure the final product will be
purely ornamental like poinsetta or some tree that has no agrivalue
beyond pretty and O2 factory. In retrospect choosing tobacco may have
been ill thought in terms of market breadth as you stated. I had no
clue there are regulations on tobacco. Here in the US you can do as you
wish...if its transgenic you'll have to wait in line at the EPA like
everyone else and field test for two years.

Sebastian S. Cocioba
CEO & Founder
New York Botanics, LLC
Plant Biotech R&D From: Cathal Garvey
Sent: 1/15/2014 5:19 PM
To: diy...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [DIYbio] Glowing plants for sale "Starlight Avatar"
Patents, eh? They make you complacent and slow, and you only think to
ship a real product when someone more driven than you bothers to.

And in this case, their "real product" is a tobacco plant, regulated for
ownership in many parts of the world and agriculturally relevant in
others, implying more stringent requirement for GMO regulatory
classification.

I'm *not* sold on the Glowing Plants project, I must say, but I'm even
less sold on "Bioglow"'s offering.

On 15/01/14 21:36, Sebastian Cocioba wrote:
>   That's BioGlow's first sale. They are the patent owners that the
> kickstarter team is "borrowing" from. This is the company whose owner
> published evidence of the first autoluminescent plant back in 2010
>
> Sebastian S. Cocioba
> CEO & Founder
> New York Botanics, LLC
> Plant Biotech R&D
>  ------------------------------
> From: SC <stac...@yahoo.com>
> Sent: 1/15/2014 4:19 PM
> To: diy...@googlegroups.com
> Subject: [DIYbio] Glowing plants for sale "Starlight Avatar"
>
> Hi everyone,
> I see that someone is selling glowing tobacco plants, called "Starlight
> Avatar."  Does anyone know if this Is this any relation to the folks that
> had the Kickstarter project for glowing Arabidopsis?
>
> http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2014/01/heres-your-chance-to-own-a-glow-in-the-dark-plantand-soon/
>
>
>

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[Koeng]

I meant propagating them. They only need a single plant to get hundreds of plants with tissue culture, which is cheap. Although I do take that statement back, it was probably extremely expensive to make the first plant, considering how much effort has to be put in just to DIY clone a plasmid, along with the fact that it wasn't an agro transformation.

[Cathal Garvey]

Also, the price of a thing is not the cost of production. The price is
what the buyer is willing to pay.

I believe we should enforce a better standard than "the market" for
things that people depend upon or which the market drives towards
destruction and pollution, like medicine, food, water, communications,
heat, electricity.. but for a glow-in-the-dark novelty, the market will
do just fine.

If people will pay €400 for a potted plant, take that as an incentive to
make a great synbio thing; the market likes novelty!

On 24/01/14 05:21, Koeng wrote:
> I meant propagating them. They only need a single plant to get hundreds of
> plants with tissue culture, which is cheap. Although I do take that
> statement back, it was probably extremely expensive to make the first
> plant, considering how much effort has to be put in just to DIY clone a
> plasmid, along with the fact that it wasn't an agro transformation.
>
>
>
> On Thursday, January 23, 2014 7:32:55 PM UTC-8, Sebastian wrote:
>>
>> Cheaply?
>>
>> The gene synthesis, planning, equipment, not to mention a PDS-1000/He, etc.
>>
>> Its not an agro transformation. Its gold down the drain and a kidney or
>> two's worth of trial and error.
>>
>> Sebastian S. Cocioba
>> CEO & Founder
>> New York Botanics, LLC
>> Plant Biotech R&D

>> ------------------------------
>> From: Koeng <javascript:>

>> Sent: 1/23/2014 10:23 PM

>> To: diy...@googlegroups.com <javascript:>

>>>> ------------------------------

>> diy...@googlegroups.com <javascript:>. To unsubscribe from this group,
>> send email to diybio+un...@googlegroups.com <javascript:>. For more

>> options, visit this group at
>> https://groups.google.com/d/forum/diybio?hl=en
>> Learn more at www.diybio.org
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>> Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/diybio.
>> To view this discussion on the web visit

>> https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/diybio/5404015f-fb4f-4dbf-a2a1-bf31c2d050ab%40googlegroups.com
>> .

>> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
>>
>

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[Sebastian Cocioba]

Very true, Cathal!
The bidding started at $1.00 and has only been open for about a week.
The interest is there even though not much has been done on the
advertisement and marketing side of things. I guess people always want
to be the first to own. About the micro propagation aspect, I've heard
that each plant is an individual transformation event regenerated from
a gene gun shot. The worry was about silencing in the second generation
since mRNA stability was tested only briefly so for now its one shot or
so per plant. Gene gun efficiency is terribly low. About 5% as compared
to agro which in my experience I've seen upwards of 80% transformation
efficiency and thats without adding exogenous phenolics like
acetosyringone of vanilla (thanks Andreas). They sell it as a rooting
culture and which you may need to wait a few days for the roots to
fully take and then transplant the culture to soil sans agar medium and
acclimatize. Luckily tobacco is hardy enough. I just hope the rooting
media agar is of high enough concentration to account for bumps in
transit. Despite its hardiness, freshly cultured tobacco leaves are
still fragile and can snap with ease.

The whole thing seems to be a publicity stunt while they figure a
solution for stable mass production. Conveniently, if there is
silencing past T0 then it kinda works in their favor. The plant will
seed and die and won't glow in subsequent generations. You could,
hypothetically, just take the ton of seeds the plant produces and plate
them on MS + kanamycin, gent, hygro, or spec. Not sure which was used
since it was a plastid transform. Prokaryotic antibiotics would work
too as long as its a 16s inhibitor and not a beta-lactam. Maybe
tetracycline? Yay, chloroplast bacteria ancestry! Off topic...sorry :)

Sebastian S. Cocioba
CEO & Founder
New York Botanics, LLC
Plant Biotech R&D From: Cathal Garvey

Sent: 1/24/2014 5:53 AM

[Cathal Garvey]

I'm surprised T1 silencing is still such a problem; have the mechanisms
of silencing in that case not been elucidated, yet?

I would have assumed that using methylase-deficient agrobacteria (or
E.coli for producing chemical/genegun prep DNA) would make a big
difference, as would careful codon usage in gene design. I know the
expression level can contribute to triggering "alarm bells" in plants,
but those mechanisms don't trigger on endogenous genes, so there must be
a signal the plants use to detect exogenous DNA.

Further, it's occurring at the T0/T1 boundary, so it is probably
occurring either during sporophyte life-cycle, gametogenesis, or
embryogenesis. Pinning it down to these points ought to help figure it out?

[Sebastian Cocioba]

I think the issue lies with whether or not the cell line is
homoplastomic at the point of self-fertilization. There could be simple
chloroplast segregation during seed formation especially since
selection pressure is no longer active. There would be no reason for
the plant to maintain the transgenic chloroplast. In my opinion it
would favor the less taxing wild type unless every single chloroplast
is transgenic. You only need one chloroplast that's still wild once you
halt selection to ruin your line...potentially. Given the relatively
quick regeneration time of tobacco and the chance for stragglers
(tissue high above selection media) it may be heteroplastomic.
Luciferase/luciferin "glow" yield may or may not indicate level of
transformed chloroplasts. If you did the regeneration step from friable
callus in liquid suspension, the chance of straggler tissue is almost
zero since the tissue is smaller and covered on all sides in selection
media. I've had a few false positive transformations via agro due to
not pushing the callus forming tissue into the agar. The absolute tips
of the curling leaf portion sometimes gets away with inducing
embryogenesis while on kanamycin, but this is rare. Rotating the
explant every replate would ruin the gravitotropic signals that
differentiate shoot from root and all you would have is callus.

I really hate the gene gun but im gonna have to love it soon. Ill be
neck deep in biolistics in a few weeks. I really hope someone on the
list makes a nice, air-in-a-can device to substitute the PDS and
somehow inactivates tungsten or steel nanoparticles so we won't
literally have to throw gold into the trash. Please?

Sebastian S. Cocioba
CEO & Founder
New York Botanics, LLC
Plant Biotech R&D From: Cathal Garvey

Sent: 1/24/2014 6:46 AM

> If people will pay EURO 400 for a potted plant, take that as an incentive to