f these compounds, controlling a flower’s fragrance while also producing more or less of it. The result? Bigger, brighter flowers with long vase lives and scent. Better smelling roses are just a few DNA tweaks away.
Creating impossible colors
Because of genetic limitations, blue roses do not exist in nature, no matter how earnestly breeders have been trying to create them. They are the holy grail of the rose world. Although nominal "blue" roses have been bred by conventional hybridization methods, they have little more than a purple tinge. And white roses can be dyed blue, but a true blue rose is rarer than a blue moon.
But after 20 years of research, Japanese company, Suntory, and its Australian subsidiary, Florigene, have managed to create a blue rose. Named “Applause,” the blue color was attained by inserting a delphinidin-producing gene from a pansy into an Old Garden ‘Cardinal de Richelieu’ rose. When the flowers debuted in Japan, they sold for between 2,000 and 3,000 yen ($22-$33) per stem.
Although Applause is more of a silvery-purple-blue than a vibrant azure, it’s the closest thing to blue yet to come from the hands of breeders and scientists. And the company promises to continue working on make it bluer. Until then, a rose is a rose is a pansy.
Removing pesky pollen
Scientists looking to increase the life of flowers ended up with a variety of geranium that offers the promise of sneeze-free blooms for allergy sufferers.
Using a genetically modified bacterium to "infect" geraniums, researchers at the Instituto de Biología Molecular y Celular de Plantas in Spain created plants that are not able to spread allergens.
To do this, they genetically altered Agrobacterium tumefaciens, the bacteria that causes the plant ailment crown gall disease, to carry a modified gene that would increase the production of the plant hormone cytokinin, which has an anti-aging effect on plant cells. They modified another gene that would interfere with the production of pollen and anthers. The bacteria carried these modified genes into the Pelargonium cells, changing their DNA. The researchers then grew new plants from these modified plant cells.
The researchers note that the new variety of geraniums is also sterile and unable to breed with plants in the wild.
Making flowers that glow in the dark
As if unusually boosted scent, unnatural color, and pollen-free flowers weren’t freaky enough, Australian company Bioconst is working on glow-in-the-dark flowers using fluorescent genes isolated from … jellyfish.
The core area of research and development currently at the company is to create genetically engineered glowing plants that rely on 'green fluorescent protein' (GFP) to make flowers fluoresce a bright green. GFP is derived from the jellyfish, Aequorea victoria. The company already has a glowing flower, called Galassia (video below), that is treated with a fluorescent spray, but the jellyfish-flower puts the others to shame.
Let's just hope they don't accidentally splice aromatic compounds of the jellyfish into the flowers as well.