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.