Nick Desnoyer, a plant biologist in Norwich, England, is designing and creating flowers that don't exist anywhere in nature. In today's episode, he reveals his next project: Paintunia, a petunia that acts as a living canvas. Nick has engineered these petunias to include an inducible gene. When he lightly touches their buds with a clear molecule called dexamethasone, the molecules seep into cells, switch on the gene, and cause them to make a pigment. The result is a paintable flower, where molecules literally control which colors show up in particular places. Nick's plan is ultimately to engineer these petunias to express three separate inducible genes, or biosynthetic pathways, for cyan, magenta, and yellow. For a prior project, Nick turned Arabidopsis, a small (and quite ugly) plant that researchers commonly use in research, into little pink 'micro-roses.' We filmed this episode surrounded by flowers. Nick patiently explained to me how each one gets its shape and pigmentation; how...
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