Driving through a lush roadway gives a relaxing and satisfying feel, doesn’t it? But yet we can’t have each and every roadway filled up with trees. Because it wouldn’t be illuminated enough. Actually maybe at night, it wouldn’t even let the moonlight through, ending up with a pitch black street view. It seems not to be that ideal. But what if we had trees that were light sources themselves, then what?

A French start-up has designed light bulbs which contains bioluminescent bacteria and the life supply they need. These living light bulbs may one day be seen on the famous streets of  Paris. But, the Dutch designer Daan Roosegaarde wants to take this idea further with the aid of todays technology. Producing self gloving plants! His idea is to use some genome editing software to enhance the plants with bioluminescence. Resulting with sofly glowing plants without any battery or solar panel.

Remember there is already bioluminescence in the nature. Such as fireflies, jelly fishes that produce subtle amounts of luciferin which is the organic light source that we are looking for. Hence, a prototype could be produced by Stony Brook University by merging luciferin with an ordinary plant, resulting in a quite simple herb which glows naturally. And Daan Roosegaarde says that they will team up with Stony Brook University to build a larger, tree-like bioluminescent plant.

So what does that mean, having self glowing trees on the streets? First it means an ecologically more efficient world. We will get rid of street lights which consume electricity, ending up with way lower carbon emmissions. Plus we will have a lot more space for trees. And the streets would look prettier 🙂 Imagine yourself, driving through a lane between those glowing trees at night.