BIOLUMINESCENCE IN PLANTS

1. Sam Higginbottom University of Agriculture, Technology & Sciences,
Prayagraj- 211007 (U.P) India
An
Assignment on
BIOLUMINESCENCE IN PLANTS
SUBMITTED BY: SUBMITTED TO
ABHIMANYU KUMAR TOMAR DR DEENA WILSON
19MSHFS009 DEPARTMENT OF HORTICULTURE
MSc Ag Horticulture Fruit Science
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2. 2
S.NO TOPIC
1. DEFINITION
2. INTRODUCTION
3. SOME OF THE ANIMALS THAT MAKE LIGHT
4. HOW IT HAPPENS?
5. CHEMISTRY’S ROLE
6. REASEARCH DURING 2017 AT MIT
7. RECENT RESEARCH DATED 27TH APRIL 2020

3. 1. DEFINATION
• When a living organism produces and emits light as a result of
chemical reaction is called Bioluminescence.
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4. 2. INTRODUCTION
• Bio means “Living” in Greek while Lumen means “light” in Latin.
• During the process, chemical energy is converted into light energy.
• The process is caused by enzyme catalyzed chemo luminescence
reaction.
• All bioluminescent organisms use a reaction between an enzyme
and a substrate to make light, but different species use different
chemicals in the process.
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5. 3. SOME OF THE ANIMALS THAT
MAKE LIGHT
• Many different types of animals
• Microscopic cells to fish and even few sharks.
• No higher vertebreates above the fish
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6. • Bacteria
• Radiolaria
• Dinoflagellates
• Funfi
• Coenlenterates and Ctenophores (Jelly Fish)
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7. • Gastropods: Squids, Octopus etc
• Annelids: Polychaetes, Earthworms
• Marine Crustaceans
• Insects: Beetles, Flies, Centipedes etc
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8. • Echinoderms: seastars, sealilies, bitterstars
• Tunicates: pyrosomes, larvaceans
• Sharks (rare)
• Fishes- many different typess
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9. • Dinofagellates are the most commonly encounted bioluminescent
organism.
• It causes sparkling light.
• “Bioluminescent bays” which are tourist destinations in Puerto Rico
and Jamaica
• Comb Jellies- 90%
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10. 4. HOW IT HAPPENS?
• Bioluminescence is product of a chemical reaction in organisms.
• Three ingredients are needed for bioluminescence to occur
1. Luciferins: It is protein like light producing substance.
2. Luciferase: It is enzyme and it allows the light producing
chemical reaction to take place.
3. Oxygen: It is colourless and odourless gas. Oxygen form 21% of
Earth’s atmosphere and it is found in water.
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11. • In presence of Oxygen, the enzyme LUCIFERASE acts upon
LUCIFERIN to produce energy. This energy takes the form of light.
• Luciferase allows oxygen to combine with luciferin and this
reaction produces light and oxydized luciferin become inactive Oxy-
luciferin.
• Some reaction do not involve this enzyme luciferase, so these
reaction involve chemical called Photo-Protein that combine with
oxygen and luciferase but require another agent, often an ion of
element calcium, to produce light
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12. 5. CHEMISTRY’S ROLE
• Bioluminescence is chemiluminescence that
occurs in a living organism. In
chemiluminescence, a molecule gets excited
by an outer energy source and goes to a
higher energy state than its usual ground
state. When the molecule looses energy, it
returns to its ground energy state, and emits
a photon of light.
• In bioluminescence, the molecule that gets
excited by an outside source is luciferin, and
the outside source is the catalyst luciferase.12

13. 6. RESEARCH DURING 2017 AT MIT
• Imagine that instead of switching on a lamp when it gets dark, you
could read by the light of a glowing plant on your desk.
• MIT engineers have taken a critical first step toward making that
vision a reality. By embedding specialized nanoparticles into the
leaves of a watercress plant, they induced the plants to give off dim
light for nearly four hours. They believe that, with further
optimization, such plants will one day be bright enough to
illuminate a workspace.
• This technology could also be used to provide low-intensity indoor
lighting, or to transform trees into self-powered streetlights, the
researchers say. 13

14. NANOBIONIC PLANTS
• Plant nanobionics, a new research area which aims to give plants novel
features by embedding them with different types of nanoparticles. The
group’s goal is to engineer plants to take over many of the functions now
performed by electrical devices. The researchers have previously
designed plants that can detect explosives and communicate that
information to a smartphone, as well as plants that can monitor drought
conditions.
• Lighting, which accounts for about 20 percent of worldwide energy
consumption, seemed like a logical next target.
• To create their glowing plants, the MIT team turned to luciferase, the
enzyme that gives fireflies their glow. Luciferase acts on a molecule
called luciferin, causing it to emit light. Another molecule called co-
enzyme A helps the process along by removing a reaction byproduct that
can inhibit luciferase activity.
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15. • The MIT team packaged each of these three components into a
different type of nanoparticle carrier. The nanoparticles, which are
all made of materials that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration
classifies as “generally regarded as safe,” help each component get
to the right part of the plant. They also prevent the components from
reaching concentrations that could be toxic to the plants.
• The researchers used silica nanoparticles about 10 nanometers in
diameter to carry luciferase, and they used slightly larger particles of
the polymers PLGA and chitosan to carry luciferin and coenzyme A,
respectively. To get the particles into plant leaves, the researchers
first suspended the particles in a solution. Plants were immersed in
the solution and then exposed to high pressure, allowing the
particles to enter the leaves through tiny pores called stomata.
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16. • Particles releasing luciferin and coenzyme A were designed to
accumulate in the extracellular space of the mesophyll, an inner
layer of the leaf, while the smaller particles carrying luciferase enter
the cells that make up the mesophyll. The PLGA particles gradually
release luciferin, which then enters the plant cells, where luciferase
performs the chemical reaction that makes luciferin glow.
• The researchers’ early efforts at the start of the project yielded plants
that could glow for about 45 minutes, which they have since
improved to 3.5 hours. The light generated by one 10-centimeter
watercress seedling is currently about one-thousandth of the amount
needed to read by, but the researchers believe they can boost the
light emitted, as well as the duration of light, by further optimizing
the concentration and release rates of the components.
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17. 7. RECENT RESEARCH DATED 27TH
APRIL 2020
• Scientists have genetically 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.
• The team worked on two species of tobacco plant. And, unlike previous
genetically engineered glowing plants, which used bioluminescent
bacteria or firefly DNA, these plants were engineered using the DNA of
bioluminescent fungi.
• The caffeic acid cycle, which is a metabolic pathway responsible for
luminescence in fungi, was recently characterised. Light emission was
reported in Nicotiana tabacum and Nicotiana benthamiana plants without
the addition of any exogenous substrate by engineering fungal
bioluminescence genes into the plant nuclear genome. 17

18. • It was discovered that these fungi synthesise luciferin from a
compound called caffeic acid, worked upon by four enzymes. Two
enzymes work to transform caffeic acid into a luminescent
precursor; a third enzyme oxidises this precursor to produce a
photon. The fourth enzyme then converts the molecule back to
caffeic acid, which can be recycled through the same process.
• And this is where things get interesting - because caffeic acid (no
relation to caffeine) is found in all plants. It's key to the biosynthesis
of lignin, the wood polymer that gives plant cell walls rigidity and
strength.
• Caffeic acid is found in all plants. It's key to the biosynthesis
of lignin, the wood polymer that gives plant cell walls rigidity and
strength.
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19. • The team reasoned that it might, therefore, be possible to genetically
engineer plants to reallocate some of their caffeic acid to the
biosynthesis of luciferin, as seen in bioluminescent fungi.
• They spliced their tobacco plants with four fungus genes associated
with bioluminescence, and carefully cultivated them. And they
found that the plants glowed with a light visible to the naked eye
from seedling to maturity - without any apparent cost to the health
of the plant.
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20. • This suggests that, unlike expression of bacterial bioluminescence,
expression of caffeic acid cycle is not toxic in plants and does not
impose an obvious burden on plant growth, at least in the
greenhouse.
• They found that younger parts of the plant glowed most brightly,
with the flowers growing brightest of all. These produced, the
researchers said, around a billion photons per minute. That's not
nearly enough to read by, but it is bright enough to be clearly
visible.
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21. REFERENCES
• news.mit.edu
• askbiologist.asu,edu
• www.slideshare.net>bioluminescence-ppt
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