@a_j_millar@fediscience.org2025-09-09 13:30:47
The firefly luciferase is being used as a 'reporter gene' here, to reveal the Kalanchoe's 24-hour rhythms in the lab. Otherwise they are invisible.
Actually the luciferase glow is not directly visible either! It's so faint that the video was taken with super-sensitive cameras, closer to astronomy kit than to your smartphone. These are transgenic plants, developed for lab science in my now-#EdinburghUni colleague Jessica Pritchard's PhD, with James Hartwell in Liverpool.
She reported this cool new science in a #preprint last year:
📖 https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.12.19.629446
and I just caught up with it, although... 2/n