Can Beautiful Flowers Change the Face of GMOs?

A start-up company has developed color-changing flowers to educate and excite the public on the possibilities of bioengineering.

Flowers that change color throughout the day, or dependent on your mood. That’s the goal of Fort Collins, Colo.-based startup, Revolution Bioengineering (RevBio). The company, headed by co-founders COO Nikolai Braun and CEO Keira Havens, sees itself at the intersection of science and art, and wants to bring the potential beauty of bioengineering to the masses. The researchers, who first began working together in the same academic plant synthetic biology lab at Colorado State University in 2010, have engineered petunias that start out white, but after watering the plants with a dilute ethanol solution, change to pink and then deep purple.

The color-changing flowers are intended as a message to the public. Genetically modified organisms (GMO), especially food-related, are not always warmly embraced by the general population. For example, a recent Pew Research study found that just 37 percent of Americans consider genetically modified foods safe to eat, while 88 percent of the scientific community believe they are indeed safe. The lack of understanding about GMOs and their tie to foods that are consumed can lead to distrust about the process. The hope for RevBio’s petunias is to offer a different, more consumer-accessible view of GMOs and bioengineering.

“This flower is purely aesthetic. It is not for human consumption,” Havens said in a statement. “It’s just a beautiful physical representation of how technology can be used as a tool to produce something artistic.”

Beautiful bioengineering

“To make the flowers change color, we fix a broken pathway,” Braun said. “The white flowers are missing an enzyme they need to produce color. We use a biological switching mechanism to turn on that enzyme, allowing the flower to bloom in full color. It’s completely user-driven too—you can decide when you want the color switch to happen.”

Specifically, the broken pathway is the anthocyanin pathway. If enzymes are absent, mutated or not expressed, the flower remains white. By modifying genes involved in anthocyanin metabolism using an ethanol-inducible promoter inserted upstream of one of the genes for a critical enzyme, and then watering the plant with essentially half of a beer, the synthesis of the anthocyanins is completed and the flower changes color. Watering the same plant with regular water inhibits gene expression and the next flower blooms will be white. The color change takes 24 hours.

A second genetically modified flower, Petunia circadia, changes color throughout the day, from pink to blue and back again. In these flowers, a circadian-regulated promoter controls the expression of a pH pump that alters vacuolar pH. A drop in vacuolar pH results in pink flowers, while an increase results in purple. As the pH changes, the modifications surrounding the central, stable anthocyanin molecule are protonated and deprotonated, resulting in absorbance change by the molecule.

The company is developing the plant in accordance with USDA guidelines to develop a “non-regulatable” plant. The guidelines ensure the plant is unlikely to become a pest.

Exciting the public

An ongoing challenge for Havens and Braun in their quest to educate the public in bioengineering is capital investment. The initial seed money for Revolution Bioengineering came from a 2014 investment by a seed stage synthetic biology accelerator, now known as Indie Bio, and much of the initial research has been done by partnering with established laboratories, such as that of Francesca Quattrocchio at the University of Amsterdam, the world’s leading petunia researcher.

The company IDT (Integrated DNA Technologies) donated gBlocks Gene fragments and custom oligonucleotides to the project, which were used to modify genes involved in anthocyanin metabolism during the development of the flowers.

Like many other researchers in this day and age, RevBio ultimately decided to launch a crowdfunding effort in March, which raised $21,000 but fell short of the $75,000 goal. According to the IndieGoGo campaign, for a $42 donation, the start-up would deliver you one color-changing petunia plant; for $60, they would donate three flowers and a lesson plan on DNA, gene regulation and genetic engineering to a teacher and school of your choice; for $99, the donor would receive three plants, and a $350,000 donation would garner a truly one-of-a-kind flower bioengineered specifically for the donor.Another synthetic biology start-up called Glowing Plants successfully crowdfunded their research on Kickstarter to engineer a glow-in-the-dark plant. The San Francisco-based company raised more than $480,000.

RevBio has worked extensively with Quattrocchio on product development— her discoveries are at the heart of the petunia flowers. Another unique collaboration in the works is with artists at the University of the Arts London. Led by Prof. Helen Story, they are working to develop a “living dress,” which will feature the color-changing flowers.

The dress is yet another way RevBio seeks to bring what it sees as the beauty of bioengineering to the general public.

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Before tinkering with the color of flowers, Braun and Havens worked on plants engineered to detect explosives and rapidly indicate their presence. After receiving positive feedback from the public, they sought out different ways people could relate to or see the importance of bioengineering.

“There is more to science than publications and profit,” reads RevBio’s website. “We believe in wonder. We believe in accessibility, transparency and sustainability. We believe that biotechnology can be used thoughtfully to build an astonishingly beautiful world.”

The long timeline it takes for plant-related biology gives the scientists “time to thoroughly explore potential negative effects with soil, ecological and bioethics experts,” something that should help ease any public concern.

Another idea featured on the company’s website is deer-resistant tulips.That will have to wait though, as the five-to-seven-year maturation rate of tulips is too much time for a start-up company to develop a product.

So for now, RevBio will continue its pursuit to make the world a little more beautiful through the use of biotechnology.