Glowing Trees

• 05-14-18 FROM FAST COMPANY

Imagine a city lit by glowing trees

instead of streetlights
Could genetically engineered trees that have been crossed with
bioluminescent algae be the emissions-free lighting source of the
future?
BY ADELE PETERS
If you happened to be in San Diego last week and stood on the beach at night, you
might have seen the ocean glowing an electric shade of blue as bioluminescent algae
bloomed, a relatively rare natural phenomenon. In a lab in Denmark, researchers are
trying to isolate the genes that makes the microalgae glow for another purpose:
potential natural streetlights.

If the genes could be tweaked and added to trees, they say, it could be possible for
trees to stand in for standard street lighting. “We could try to change some of that
lighting from conventional, electricity-consuming lights to a more natural way of
creating light,” says Kristian Ejlsted, CEO of Allumen, a new startup based near
Copenhagen.
Ejlsted began researching bioluminescent algae as a student at the Technical

University of Denmark, and his startup now sells kits with the algae that teachers can
use to help visually explain photosynthesis, respiration, and other natural processes in
science classes. Another product, for home use, will be a little like a lava lamp, with
algae living in a saltwater-nutrient mixture, taking up sunshine during the day, and
glowing at night. But Ejlsted is most interested in the larger potential for the genes that
make the algae glow.
The tens of thousands of streetlights in large cities can make up, in some cases, the
largest piece of city’s energy bills. Over the last decade, cities have increasingly
switched from older technology to LED lights; in Los Angeles, for example, where the
city began switching its 200,000-plus streetlight to LEDs in 2013, it cut energy use for
the lights by more than 63%, saving nearly $10 million a year on energy and
maintenance bills. But the lights are still a major source of emissions.
“In Denmark, almost all streetlights are now being replaced by LED lights,” Ejlsted
says. “That’s a huge deal right now, and it’s going to save a lot of energy. But the fact
is that they’re still using electricity–they’re using a little bit less, but it’s still electricity,
and it still comes from burning fossil fuels. The real advantage of changing to a
biological system is that the algae, for example, or the plant, they only need CO2 and
sunlight and some water.”
The company is not the first to explore the idea of glowing plants and trees. One
Kickstarter project, the Glowing Plant, raised nearly half a million dollars, but later told
backers they’d failed in their quest to genetically engineer small plants that could glow.
A team of researchers at MIT embedded nanoparticles with an enzyme from fireflies
into plants, creating a faint glow. In France, biologist Pierre Calleja is experimenting
with prototypes of lamps filled with glowing microalgae. Designer Daan Roosegaarde
has also experimented with the idea of glowing trees.
Any project like this presents ethical challenges, says Dimitri Deheyn, a researcher at
Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “The problem remains the same on the ethics of
using genetically engineered trees,” he says. “What happens to the animals and plants
that surround them, cross-fertilize with them, or feed on them?”
The projects are also far from reality. Eljsted, who continues to work with researchers
at the university, believes that the relevant genes in the microalgae he’s studying can
be found relatively quickly. “I think we’re very close to getting it,” he says. But several
more complicated steps would also have to happen to make that gene perform as
needed in a tree. The blue light may also not be bright enough, without more tweaking,
to stand in for LEDs.
Denmark is aiming for all-renewable electricity by 2035, and it’s possible it will be close
to that goal by the time a theoretical bioluminescent light becomes a reality. But if the
lights are ever made, they could potentially have some advantages over lights powered
by renewable electricity. Even if every streetlight ran on renewables, that energy source
(and the streetlights themselves) would still take resources to build and operate. Gene-
edited glowing trees, if they can be grown, could theoretically eliminate the need to
manufacture that equipment, would require little cost, and zero electricity. They also
would be efficient. “Algae and plants have evolved through billions of years to very
efficiently capture sunlight,” says Eljsted. “We can’t really recreate that yet in solar
panels.”

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• 05-14-18 FROM FAST COMPANY

Imagine a city lit by glowing trees

Ejlsted began researching bioluminescent algae as a student at the Technical

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