Engineered petunias become living canvases: painting flowers with dexamethasone
NikoMcCarty · x · 2026-10-08
The 'How to Design Flowers' podcast episode features bioengineer Nick Desnoyer, who combines genetic engineering, breeding, and pathogens to create flowers that don't exist in nature.
- He unveils Paintunia, an engineered petunia line acting as a living canvas.
- An inducible gene is switched on by touching buds with dexamethasone, triggering pigment production at specific spots; the goal is three independently expressible colors (cyan, magenta, yellow).
- His dream: a botanical garden of never-before-seen flowers; the episode explains flower morphology, pigmentation, breeding-plus-engineering workflows, and mining papers for useful mutations.
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