🌿 You've seen the succulent Kalanchoe's in #bloomscrolling but have you seen its leaves glowing in the dark? 🌟 👀 🧵
➡️ https://youtu.be/HdpArmDxA6M
OK this is #plantscience 📖 for data not visuals, so in grayscale with all the leaves laid out flat. 🧬 🧪
But it's glowing using the firefly protein luciferase 🌟, hooked up to the plant's biological clock ⏰ ... so the leaves glow once per day ... 1/n
The firefly luciferase is being used as a 'reporter gene' here, to reveal the Kalanchoe's 24-hour rhythms in the lab. Otherwise they are invisible.
Actually the luciferase glow is not directly visible either! It's so faint that the video was taken with super-sensitive cameras, closer to astronomy kit than to your smartphone. These are transgenic plants, developed for lab science in my now-#EdinburghUni colleague Jessica Pritchard's PhD, with James Hartwell in Liverpool.
She reported this cool new science in a #preprint last year:
📖 https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.12.19.629446
and I just caught up with it, although... 2/n
... a quick search found that 24 of Jessica's datasets are now public on our BioDare2 resource - for example,
https://biodare2.ed.ac.uk/experiment/21689
I used to work on this area - references in the preprint from 1992(!). Still, great to see how useful this approach can be. 3/n
Just part of discussion you'll hear on the #UCU picket line. 💪
Our university has ended up being more exposed than others to the funding issues in UK higher education. It's very unclear where their £140M savings target has come from. This is a major issue for trust and transparency, given the potential (un)employment consequences of seeking ~10% savings in 18 months.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c784923y6vpo
4/4. 🧵 ends.
Andrew Millar