Karen Sarkisyan

The “Firefly” glowing petunia is one of the first biotech house plants you can buy—and the only one that glows in the dark. It’s sold in the US by a startup, Light Bio, but was created in Russia by a team co-led by Karen Sarkisyan, 34, a Moscow native now running a synthetic biology lab at MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences, in London.

A few organisms luminesce naturally, but not plants. Wouldn’t it be nice if they did? Like in the movie Avatar, you could imagine moon gardens full of softly glowing creatures. “I wanted to make glowing plants,” says Sarkisyan, “but realized there was no technology to do it.”

That changed when a team at the Russian Academy of Sciences worked out how tropical fungi glow in the dark. Sarkisyan then dipped into these organisms’ genomes to identify the genes they need to pull it off. The result? A package of just five genes that Sarkisyan and his colleagues showed can be transferred to any plant to make it light up. The result, he says, is “genetically encoded transferrable bioluminescence.”

A glowing plant is pretty cool. But it’s serious science, too. Sarkisyan has found that the property can be used to watch, in real time, as a plant produces a hormone or responds to an attack by pests. “The next step for us is to use the system to view plant physiology,” he says. “It makes it easy to image a plant.”

The business of glowing plants looks promising, too. Light Bio sold out of its $29 light-up petunias in a few months. Sarkisyan, who is the startup’s chief scientist, says he’s now trying to double the petunia’s brightness (from a faint shine, like moonlight). “It has been more successful than we could have hoped,” he says of the startup. “And it’s a monopoly.” A patent he and colleagues are seeking could mean only Light Bio can legally produce this unique product.