unReduced

Is gene escape a possibility using your methodology? If you have glowing Arabidopsis, would you expect there to be some escape into the wild and crossing with non-glowing populations?

Do you think that species concepts are vital from a biodiversity perspective? Or should we be considering other things, like variation in populations, when talking about maintaining biodiversity?

This is true, but only if the plant is under some resource limitation. It also assumes a fitness cost, which makes sense but is probably unknown how much of a cost that would be.

Depending on how this functions in the plant (i.e. is there a need for two copies in the genome for the pathway to function), you could have heterozygosity in a population where the glowing phenotype isn't produced. Occasionally, this could result in a homozygous individual that glows. This of course, is based off of no understanding of how this pathway works in the plants.

I am not against your work. I think it is very cool. I am just curious if this is something that has been considered. It would provide a very interesting platform for studying transgene escape, since the phenotype is very noticeable (compared to things like BT cotton).

Very cool study. Thanks for posting!

Which species? I can only find one non-marine species of bioluminescent bacteria (Photorhabdus luminescens), which lives in the gut of a nematode that infects insects. I imagine over millions of years it is possible that things could happen for this pathway to be implemented in plants, but that depends on when this pathway evolved, could the full pathway be transferred to plants, is it in a plasmid that something like Agrobacterium might pick up, etc.

In this case, you are introducing an already functioning version of the pathway into a population. There is also potential for multiple introductions. Will it die out? Maybe. Will it be through selection? Possibly. Will it be through drift? Maybe more likely. Will it still persist in the collective genome of the population? Possibly.