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Chinese scientists reveal glowing plants that could light cities
(www.euronews.com)
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this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2026
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Given that these plants would need to devote a significant amount of resources to store the energy in order to produce light, I would expect they would be outcompeted by regular plants that aren't wasting their energy in the wild. Selection pressures generally favor efficient use of energy.
Your reasoning makes sense but we can’t really be sure until we let their seeds loose in the wild and see how they do. Bioluminescent animals and algae do exist. There’s no reason why there couldn’t be some unforeseen selective benefit that would allow these mutated glowing plants to thrive
Anything could happen obviously, but it's not really fundamentally different from something evolving naturally either. If there is some benefit to this, we might see a new kind of ecosystem developing around these plants. That's always a risk with biology.
Good point.