Never to be outshone — literally, in this case — Chinese scientists have one-upped American researchers and their bioluminescent petunias with what they’re calling world’s first multi-colored glowing plants.
As the journal Nature reports, this glow-in-the-dark succulent hails from the South China Agricultural University (SCAU) in Guangzhou, where materials researchers have developed a technology that recharges the plants via sunlight and makes them as bright as a night-light and with many of the colors of the rainbow, sometimes even in the same plant.
Biologist Shuting Liu, one of the SCAU researchers behind these radiant plants and the first author of a new paper on them in the journal Matter, likened the succulents’ glow to the futuristic bioluminescence seen in a particular science fiction franchise.
“Picture the world of Avatar, where glowing plants light up an entire ecosystem,” Liu said in a statement. “We wanted to make that vision possible using materials we already work with in the lab. Imagine glowing trees replacing streetlights.”
Last year, the beautiful “Firefly Petunia” from the American startup Light Bio delighted consumers as they rushed to purchase the gene-hacked greenery for just $29 in pre-orders, eventually skyrocketing it onto Time magazine’s best inventions of 2024 list. As NPR reported last year, the petunias’ creator, biologist Keith Wood, worked for almost 40 years to make such beautiful and bright herbage, eventually landing on genes isolated from glowing mushrooms to make it happen.
Unlike that gorgeous flowering friend, Nature noted that Chinese team behind the multi-colored succulents used something far more commonplace than genes from luminous fungi: nanoparticles similar to those that have made hippie-dippie blacklight posters luminesce in so many college dorm rooms for half a century now. (They’re also found in glow-in-the-dark paints and toys, and used for imaging tracing in lab rodents.)
Injected directly into each of the succulents’ leaves, the nanoparticles in question — phosphor particles made of strontium and aluminum, plus other heavy metals, the Nature article noted — manage to store light energy, and then spit it back out over the course of several hours.
Since the succulents are “charged” by sunlight, they have to be left out regularly to attain that energy before producing their brilliant “afterglow.” Still, the Guangzhou based team managed to make each plant emit blue, green, violet, red, and white for up to 120 minutes after sufficient sunlight charging. As the image below shows, the plants continued to glow (and darken) at the same intensity for the entire 10-day duration of the study.
The SCAU researchers chose the Echevaria succulent genus because, unlike plants with thinner, dryer leaves that emitted a patchier glow, the succulents lit up more uniformly. Their favorite type of succulent, the Nature paper notes, is the “Mebina” variety, a common houseplant that grows thick, dense leaves in a rosette pattern that radiates from its center.
As proof of concept, Liu and her team made a wall of glowing Mebina that were bright enough to read a book.
“I just find it incredible that an entirely human-made, micro-scale material can come together so seamlessly with the natural structure of a plant,” the researcher said in the statement. “The way they integrate is almost magical. It creates a special kind of functionality.”
Wood, the bioluminescent plant pioneer, told Nature that it’s still somewhat unclear to him how exactly such intense chemicals might affect the plants’ overall health. He added as a word of warning that they could be toxic if ingested, making the need for additional safety testing paramount.
Though he doesn’t think they’ll be acting as a bio-streetlamps any time soon, Wood nevertheless expressed approval of the SCAU project.
“We’re making something fun, enjoyable, magical,” he told Nature.
More on magic plants: Evidence Grows That Tripping on Shrooms Might Increase Your Lifespan