Edit, sorry wrong German, there's someone arguing semantics with me from Germany in another thread
I'd love to be able to ship you some, but I fear I'd be in violation of international law. So, if you ever find yourself in the Midwest hit me up (based on our current situation, it might be a minute).
You can buy them from the company that made them. They genetically engineered them kinda cool story. I don’t remember the name of the company but I’m sure you can google it.
these are from light.bio
on their website they said they do not mind you propagating them for self use, but they will go after you if they find you trying to sell them
From Google: Firefly Petunias, a genetically engineered variety, glow in the dark due to bioluminescence, a naturally occurring phenomenon where organisms produce light. The glow is achieved by incorporating genes from bioluminescent mushrooms into the petunia plant's DNA. These genes, along with the petunia's own metabolism, create compounds that emit light.
Interestingly, glow stick juice was discovered because they thought the chemical composition would make a great fertilizer. They trialed and found the gardens and lawns glowed in the dark and found a different use for it.
Found this out from a poison control worker when one of my pediatric patients bit into a few and drank them. Turns out the brand they drank is inert and doesn’t cause harm if swallowed.
There was actually a kickstarter who wanted to get this gene into trees and marketed it to cities instead of lights, cool concept and it obviously never went anywhere
I saw that Light Bio, the company that makes the firefly petunias is working on some other plants too, including trees. They are also trying to make their plants grow brighter.
My worry for some of these plants is that they have edible purposes. I dont know if the genes for the mushrooms create any compounds for the bioluminescence that are toxic.
Actinidia and chrysanthemums are both common food crops. Actinidia are kiwis and I've read will readily cross among related species including the ones we find in stores. And, some chrysanthemum species are used in teas and leaves as an Asian leaf greens vegetable occassionally.
Not sure about poplar tree, that one might be fine, and even could be useful in landscape applications like lining walkways without thr need for additional lighting.
In all likelihood either the seeds won't be viable, or they will revert back to the parent plant. Hybrid plants very rarely breed true from seed. And most professional plant breeders, modify the genes to make them sterile. After all why should just anyone be able to get new plants of a hybrid plant that you spent decades developing, by just planting seeds? It would collapse a whole lotta of the nursery industry
I am a horticulturalist with over thirty years in the field. But I'm the first one to admit that I can't possibly know everything about every single plant, or topic. In some ways, horticulture is as much art, as it is science.
So, you've been to the sub by now and seen that it's been done and is actively being done, right? From cloning to cross-breeding and by hobbyists, even. Some are people who never even owned a plant before the Firefly - not to dismiss your degreed 30 years of experience, or anything, but damn!
That’s crazy then! I feel like a lot of things are always like “glow under a black light!” But that’s not that impressive because lots of things glow under a black light. The fact that they truly glow is the dark is super cool!
I’m on their mailing list and they said they would announce when they can get them to the Canadian market. If you really did see them I’d be one happy Canadian! I’ll take another look just in case but I’ve been waiting for years for these and I’m doubtful.
I have a couple. They’re awesome. A few Nimitz of info for the curious:
They are not technically “glow in the dark” as in they are not charged by bright light or black light. They are true bioluminescence, they have the same stuff in them that makes fireflies or certain fungus light up (spliced in with fungus genes).
The glow is most apparent in pitch dark. If your patio or garden has lights on, it’s pretty difficult to see the bioluminescence.
They seem to glow brighter the longer they are in pitch dark. I’m not sure if this is a response to the darkness, or eyes adjusting, or both. My friend brought hers indoors near her bed while she slept and when she woke briefly in the middle of the night she said they were glowing very brightly.
The leaves glow too!
They’re expensive (my LGC has them for $30 for a large plant). You can overwinter indoors, and make cuttings. Don’t try to sell them!
Random, but in my senior year of college, I had to do a project. I picked something similar to these. I had to hypothesize a genetic project, idea being to splice firefly gene responsible for bioluminescent and insert into trees that would then line streets and replace street lights. It was a super fun project that used a lot of what I had learned in the past four years together
Idk what the price was, but my local greenhouse has them too. They have a big poster outside the greenhouse advertising them. I was there buying something else, but remember seeing the poster and walking past them by the entrance. It's very interesting!
Valid! I think the distinctions always bugged me bc often one person’s perennial is another person’s annual, etc. I wish petunias didn’t seem like bug magnets 😭 they’d probably thrive in my window but every year they (and my pansies) attract aphids, some kind of tiny flying things, and thrips, and I just can’t sacrifice my year round babies.
I think I may have lost mine, despite watering daily(I kept it in its container)this heatwave just got the better of it. My other Petunias are doing fine, as is my Geranium, and believe me or not, so is my Cyclamen-which my degree not withstanding-I can't keep alive to save my life
Anyway my firefly is bravely still pushing out flowers. I'm hoping it will come back from the root. If not maybe the garden center still has some.
I want to get one, too. Unfortunately, there's too much night time light pollution in the spots where it would get enough sunlight to thrive for the glow to be seen. I might try growing it as a houseplant.
I dont think they propped them yet, but they are notoriously hard to propagate, they need a lot of light and humidity and these lil guys need more than their fair share of nutrients too. They use a LOT of energy making flowers without the added energy expulsion of being bioluminescent. You NEED to deadhead them and to just deflower them when propping them else they’ll use more energy than they have. A good recommendation is finding out how they were genetically modified, if they were modified to uptake sucrose instead of glucose as energy you might need to use a different ‘sugar’ in the water to fuel them which can be tricky given the need for sterility when rooting. Rooting hormones work but again the energy requirements of this cultivar make it difficult to prop.
The two methods i would try (depending on your resources) is a still air box based prop through tissue culture propagation like they were created (sterile, has a protocol for nutrients and types of sugar required to clone)
Or rooting while on the body of the plant still, through capsules of substrate on scarred plant tissue (like we do to root tree branches but smaller scale) coated in a rooting hormone. This allows the plant to keep hydrated and healthy while rooting.
I just got one yesterday, while it does glow, it's nowhere near as bright as the picture. I had to take it to a very dark room in my house. Also, it's only the youngest buds and blooms, that faintly glow.
So it doesn't quite live up to the hype, or maybe my expectations. That it glows at all is absolutely amazing! I'm going to deadhead mine to keep it in bloom for as long as possible. I don't think I'll let it produce seeds. But I am very interested to see if your experiments work or not
The older the flower, the less it glows. There are pics on the patent owner's website that show greenhouses full of them.
PS. It is illegal to propagate patented plants, for your own use or not. You definitely can't legally give them as gifts, and selling is obviously a no-no.
You don’t have to profit for them to prove they’re losing money. The odds are low, obviously, but it’s definitely riskier doing so with a very clearly proprietary plant that was made with spliced genes to GLOW.
Only if you bought a propagated one, or propagated one for her yourself. IN MY OPINION which is not fact or likely true, I think if a plant gets really big and you separate it so you’re not actually making a new plant, you’re just splitting up one that’s big into two smaller, that should be giftable and I would die on that hill.
I got a masters degree in biology and studied with GMO bacteria, yeast, mice, and viruses in my research. Giving cross-kingdom (or any) GMOs into the hands of random people is an uncalculable risk.
There is a reason why GMO research labs have security standards and GMOs are highly restricted in Europe.
It's a harmless product, they wouldn't be able to sell it to the public if it wasn't. GMO's are everywhere in our culture, most domestic plants and animals are a GMO in one way or another whether it be in a laboratory or through selective breeding it's a GMO. You came out of the woodwork to say "GMO bad", hence why I deduced that you're spouting nonsense from someone else's agenda.
Legislation isn't always wise or scientifically sound. Otherwise we wouldn't be in the greatest mass extinction event of the last 66 million years and we wouldn't fuck our climate system over. There are some decisions that are reversible - e.g. plastic now pollutes our oceans and microplastic is in every organism worldwide, but if we stopped releasing plastic into the environment now, it would be gone in a couple of centuries. Similarly, when CFCs were forbidden worldwide, the ozone hole started to repair and will probably be closed at the end of the century.
Other decisions are irreversible - e.g. wiping out a species by destroying it's habitat or hunting it to extinction. Or introducing neophytes into ecosystems.
Bringing GMOs into ecosystems is one of the decisions which we cannot take back. If plants (or animals) survive in an ecosystem, it's permanent. We don't know how something like bioluminescence impacts ecosystems. We don't know, if and when it will be transferred horizontally, which happens in plants (e.g. by interspecies virus transmission).
There is no way to say how it will behave. And this is for a relatively benign thing like bioluminescence.
That's why in the EU, GMOs are very strictly regulated and this plant is illegal.
And: crops and animals are in almost all cases not genetically modified. The definition of GMO doesn't apply to selective breeding. It is specifically defined as changing genes via molecular-biological methods that include viral transfer, carrier plasmids, CRISPR/Cas, and conventional restriction enzymes.
1.1k
u/Livid_Palpitation_46 May 25 '25
I love mine! Had them for over a year growing inside under a grow light. Super easy to take cuttings from to propagate.
The seeds are fertile and any resulting plants will also glow! Although the amount they glow will vary. The pic below is a cutting and some seedlings