If you’ve ever wanted to live your life adrift amid a sea of gently glowing succulents, that dream just got a tiny step closer.
By Michelle Starr
A team of scientists at South China Agricultural University has managed to create succulents that glow in the dark through a process that can be recharged using sunlight. Moreover, they can glow in multiple different colors to form a rainbow of lights – even in the same succulent.
The glow doesn’t last forever, and each leaf needs to be treated separately. But the first step of creating an injectable medium that makes the plant emit a gentle luminescence has been achieved.
“Picture the world of Avatar, where glowing plants light up an entire ecosystem,” says biologist Shuting Liu of South China Agricultural University.
“We wanted to make that vision possible using materials we already work with in the lab. Imagine glowing trees replacing streetlights.”
Many of us surround ourselves with, and nurture, plant life. If that plant life were able to glow, like organisms such as fireflies and eldritch things deep in the ocean, it could provide a low-cost, solar-powered, and stunningly beautiful means of lighting our homes or gardens.
Scientists have experimented with various ways to do this, resulting in methods that are frustratingly complex and not exactly low cost.
Liu and her colleagues based their technique on afterglow phosphor particles, similar to the materials that go into glow-in-the-dark toys and stickers. This presented a few major challenges. Larger particles glow more strongly, but permeate the plant less effectively; and not all plants absorb and disseminate the particles well.
