Ready, set, grow: These are the biotech plants you can buy now

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Ready, set, grow: These are the biotech plants you can buy now

By Antonio Regalado | MIT Technology Review | February 22, 2024

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Biotech seeds have been a huge business for a while. In fact, by sheer mass, GMOs are probably the single most significant product of genetic engineering ever. Except most of us aren’t planting rows of cotton or corn that can resist worms or survive a spritz of RoundUp, the big gene-splicing innovations that companies like Monsanto and Pioneer Hi-Bred first introduced in the 1990s.  What makes these new plants different is that you can buy them directly from their creators and then plant them in the yard, on a balcony, or just in a pot. 

Starting from tomato seeds from Norfolk Health Produce, a small company in Davis, California, that created what it calls the Purple Tomato. There is a plan to mass-produce the purple tomatoes for sale in supermarkets. But the company couldn’t ignore thousands of requests from regular gardeners. 

The next is “firefly petunia,” so called because the plant is supposed to glow in the dark. It’s sold by Light Bio, a startup backed by the venture capital firm NFX .  The plant is such a novelty that it’s being sold in a preorder, with promises they will arrive by May. One petunia plant costs $29 plus $24 for shipping. The company’s marketing promises that your plant will unveil “mesmerizing luminescence after dusk” and that “its soothing light is produced from living energy, cultivating a deeper connection with the inner life of the plant.”  It joins a short list of ornamental plants with gene modifications. Another is an orange petunia, approved in the US in 2021, that got its unusual color from a corn gene. 

Like a lot of things in biotech, making a glowing petunia was not easy to do—it’s the seemingly sudden result of decades of research into the chemistry that permits certain plants and animals to glow faintly.  Imposing those genetic circuits on plants did not work too well at first. Several years ago, for instance, a Kickstarter project that raised nearly $500,000 to make glowing roses failed to deliver on its promises after the project proved too difficult.

3 key takeaways from the article

1. Biotech seeds have been a huge business for a while. In fact, by sheer mass, GMOs are probably the single most significant product of genetic engineering ever. The big gene-splicing innovations were first introduced in the 1990s by companies like Monsanto and Pioneer Hi-Bred.  What makes these new plants different is that you can buy them directly from their creators and then plant them in the yard, on a balcony, or just in a pot. 
2. Starting from tomato seeds from Norfolk Health Produce, a small company in Davis, California, that created what it calls the Purple Tomato.  And the next is “firefly petunia,” so called because the plant is supposed to glow in the dark. It’s sold by Light Bio, a startup backed by the venture capital firm NFX .
3. Like a lot of things in biotech, making a glowing petunia was not easy to do—it’s the seemingly sudden result of decades of research into the chemistry that permits certain plants and animals to glow faintly. 

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Topics:  Technology, Biotechnology, Agriculture, Genetically Modified Plants