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Researchers in the US are working on a new variety of petunia that
changes colours throughout the day, from red in the morning to blue in
the evening, with various purple hues in-between. They're calling it the
'Petunia Circadia,' because its pigment molecules - or anthocyanins - will be expressed based on the plant's circadian rhythm over a 12-hour period.
Researchers
in the US are working on a new variety of petunia that changes colours
throughout the day, from red in the morning to blue in the evening, with
various purple hues in-between. They're calling it the 'Petunia
Circadia,' because its pigment molecules - or anthocyanins - will be expressed based on the plant's circadian rhythm over a 12-hour period. "No
chemicals, no complicated care - just sunlight, soil and a flower that
changes colour," Nikolai Braun, co-founder and chief scientific officer
of a new biotech company, Revolution Bioengineering, told Diane Nelson at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis). "Plants
have circadian rhythms, or cyclical expression of genes throughout the
day. These rhythms allow them to start photosynthesis when the Sun comes
up, for example, or release fragrance in the evening when their
pollinators are active. Petunia Circadia will harness this internal
clock to regulate flower colour." Braun and his colleague, Keira
Havens, haven't mastered the Petunia Circadia just yet, but as you can
see above, they're well on their way. So far, they've managed to
engineer a petunia that grows white, and turns pink over a 24 hour
period, when an ethanol solution is applied. It works because when the
flower is about to bloom, it's unable to produce pigment-containing
anthocyanins, so appears white. But when ethanol is applied, this
repairs the pathways that are needed to distribute the pigment
throughout the flower's cells. "The petunia typically produces
white blooms, but if you water it with the ethanol solution, the
existing flowers will go from white to red and new flowers will bloom a
purplish red," Braun told Megan Gambino at Smithsonian Magazine.
"The flowers are typically all white because the enzymatic pathway to
produce anthocyanins is broken at an early step. When elements in the
cell come in contact with ethanol, they will cause the missing enzyme in
the anthocyanin pathway to be produced, and the flower will turn that
purple colour." All it takes is a little fresh water to shift the flower back into a pristine white. While
these cute new flowers aren't meant to be anything other than a sweet
little curiosity, Braun and Havens hope they will help introduce people
to the benefits offered by genetically modified plants. "For almost
everyone outside of the farming world, it will be the first time they
will have interacted with a genetically modified organism, and by
engineering traits for consumers - flower colours, shapes, smells." Braun told Gambino at Smithsonian Magazine.
"We hope to normalise that technology to eventually fully realise the
promise of plant biotech to provide food, fuels, and fibres in a
sustainable way." Gambino reports that the pair is looking into
how to create single plants that produce many different coloured
flowers, and flowers that produce new scents, and new patterns, such as
polka dots. Plant geneticist Pam Ronald at UC Davis told press officer Diane Nelson
that projects like this could help educate people about her own
research. Recently, she managed to develop genetically engineered
bananas that are resistant to the Xanthomonas wilt disease, which has
already destroyed millions of acres of fruit trees in East Africa, where
they're a staple food source. "It can be hard to connect to the reality of people struggling in far-away places," she told UC Davis. “So when you tell people that genetic engineering can be used to fight
hunger by increasing vitamin content and reducing crop loss to insects,
sometimes it just doesn’t register. Maybe seeing this technology at work
in your own backyard can make the science more accessible." Source: Smithsonian Magazine With thanks to Science Alert.
The first box of Crayolas rolled off the production line 101 years ago, and today the company’s Easton, Pennsylvania, factory turns out 12 million crayons a day. “We maintain the process as though we were making food,” says Dave Farkas, manager of manufacturing quality assurance at the plant. Makes sense, given how likely its consumers are to put the product in their mouths. Here’s how Crayola makes the iconic (but inedible) color sticks.
1. Melt Twice a week, railcars full of uncolored paraffin wax pull up to the factory. An oil-filled boiler heats the cars with steam, and workers pump the now-molten glop into a silo. Each silo holds up to 100,000 pounds of wax, and the plant empties a silo nearly every day.
2. Mix From the silos, the wax moves through pipes to the mix kettles. Operators add a strengthening additive and dump in a bag of powdered pigment. The amount varies by the saturation and opacity of the color—yellow requires only a few pounds per 250-pound batch; black requires a lot more.
3. Pour Pumps move the newly colored liquid into a flat-topped, water-cooled steel rotary mold with 110 crayon-shaped cavities. An ejection station spits out the crayons, and a robotic arm carries them to the labeling operation.
4. Label
The crayons feed into a big metal drum, where they get labels and adhesive. Then the crayons are stored by color in inventory boxes.
5. Pack ROYGBIV colors come off the line every day, but exotics—periwinkle, say—must wait until the factory is making larger packs. Then operators feed the sticks into funnels, which drop one of each color onto a platform so a mechanical arm can sweep them into a box.
6. Scan A laser etches a date code on the cardboard, and a metal detector makes sure nothing but crayon is inside. Then, robotic packing machines bundle the boxes onto pallets, or into the cardboard display cases that await lucky kids in the school supplies aisle.
