Bioengineering has always been discussed in the community. But for the esoteric knowledge of biology is poorly understood, it is often difficult to understand genetically modified products. According to a survey, only about 37% of Americans believe genetically modified foods are safe, and the scientific community in the United States scientists that believe GM foods are safe accounted for 88%. Recently, a company has developed a kind of flower that can change color, aiming to help people to better understand bioengineering as well as bringing beauty to the public.

Nikolai Braun, one of the founders of the company introduced: the flowers that lose the function of certain enzyme can’t produce colors, so they are white. By using biological switch mechanism to make the enzyme function, the flowers will present bright colors. In particular, if the enzyme is missing, mutated or not expressed, the flowers will look white. Researchers introduced ethanol-inducible promoter at the upstream of the gene and at the same time watering with beer . Then the flowers will change color after anthocyanin were generated. But if common water were used to irrigate, the gene expression would be inhibited, and when at the next flowering time, the flower will come back to white. A second genetically modified flower, Petunia circadia, changes color throughout the day, from pink to blue and back again. In these flowers, a circadian-regulated promoter controls the expression of a pH pump that alters vacuolar pH.

Bioengineering may be related to so many fields. Good or bad, different people may have different opinions. Changing the color of the flower by ourselves sounds interesting, I can accept this one. How do you think about it?