Introduction
Luminescence is a common physical phenomenon to create light, which was
discovered among more than 10,000 species, i.e., bacteria, fungi,
protists and animals (Desjardin et al., 2008; Haddock et al., 2010;
Meighen, 1991). Luminescence is a kind of specific communication
approaches for signaling, such as alarming predators (Burford &
Robison, 2020), trapping prey (Verdes & Gruber, 2017; Wainwright &
Longo, 2017) and attracting mates (Ellis & Oakley, 2016). During the
past years, it was found that fluorescent proteins (FPs) and
bioluminescent systems are responsible for induction of most native
luminescence (Kim & Paulmurugan, 2021). FPs generate photoluminescece
that is excited by specific emission without consumption of ATP
(Chudakov et al. 2010), while bioluminescent systems exhibit light by
oxidation of a specific substrate, luciferin, with co-factors, e.g., ATP
and NADH, and catalyzed by the specific enzyme, luciferase (Fleiss &
Sarkisyan, 2019).
Despite luminescence was found among many species, native terrestrial
plants haven’t been reported to produce luminescence yet. Bioluminescent
systems and FPs have been initially proven to be powerful toolkits as
biomarkers and biosensors in living plant cells. Recently, based on the
newly-discovered bioluminescent systems and enhancement of suboptimized
luminescence, the glowing plants were created (Reuter et al., 2020). The
glowing plants can be used as the illumination for reading and writing
(Kwak et al., 2017), though most of them are currently gloomy. As cool
light, bioluminescence and fluorescence are softer and more effective
compared with traditional artificial light, which makes glowing plants
as valuable source for aesthetics and lighting. However, the pratical
application of glowing plants was currently not availble due to
cytotoxicity of most bioluminescent systems, and lack of understanding
of optical characteristics and biosynthetic pathways of bioluminescent
systems. Solving those problems are helpful for developing the optimized
glowing plants in the future (Kaskova et al. 2016; Strack 2019).
Here, we summarized the literatures of rebuilding bioluminescent systems
and FPs to make glowing plants. The key points for design and
optimization of glowing plants, and the potential applications of
glowing plants are also proposed. These glowing plants might be useful
in scientific researching, as well as promising substitutes of
artificial light to light up the night sky in the future.