在科学家邓稼先的一生中 科学家创造出一生都能发光的新植物

科学家创造出一生都能发光的新植物  

The glowing greenhouse of our dreams is still so very far away
but it just got a tantalising nudge closer.
Scientists have geically engineered a plant with not just a visible glow
but a self-sustaining glow that lasts for the duration of the plant's life cycle.
It's a breathtaking improvement on previous glowing plants. It's brighter than previous geically engineered tobacco plants
and it doesn't need to be fed with chemicals to maintain luminescence. Also
the duration of the glow is much longer than glowing plants produced using plant nanobionics.
这是在之前发光植物基础上的惊人进步，比之前进行基因改造的菸草要更亮，也不需要添加化学物质来维持发光。发光时间也比采用植物纳米仿生学的发光植物更长。
Of course
we all immediately think of a breathtaking Avatar-style night garden
glittering and gleaming in the darkness
and - further into the future - reducing our dependence on electric lighting.
But glowing greenery could also help us understand the plants themselves - how their metabolism works
and how they respond to the world around them.
The team worked on o species of tobacco plant. And
unlike previous geically engineered glowing plants
which used bioluminescent bacteria or firefly DNA
these plants were engineered using the DNA of bioluminescent fungi.
"Although bacterial bioluminescence genes can be targeted to plastids to engineer autoluminescence
it is technically cumbersome and fails to produce sufficient light
" the researchers wrote in their paper.
"The caffeic acid cycle
which is a metabolic pathway responsible for luminescence in fungi
was recently characterised. We report light emission in Nicotiana tabacum and Nicotiana benthamiana plants without the addition of any exogenous substrate by engineering fungal bioluminescence genes into the plant nuclear genome."