Nick Desnoyer, a plant biologist in Norwich, England, is designing and creating flowers that don’t exist anywhere in nature. In this interview, he reveals his next project: Paintunia, a petunia that acts as a living canvas. These petunias have an inducible gene; when you lightly touch a bud (before it opens) with a clear molecule, called dexamethasone, that molecules seeps into cells, switches on the gene, and causes them to make a pigment. The result is a paintable flower, where molecules are literally used to control which colors show up in which places. For a prior project, Nick turned Arabidopsis, a small (and quite ugly) plant widely used in research, into little pink “micro-roses.”

We filmed this episode surrounded by flowers, with Nick walking me through how each one gets its shape and pigmentation. He explained how he combines breeding and genetic engineering to make flowers, and how he searches scientific papers for mutations to figure out which plant crosses to make next. His ultimate dream is to build a botanical garden filled with weird and wonderful flowers that exist nowhere else. Thanks to Plasmidsaurus for sponsoring this episode.

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Timestamps:

1:28 Paintunia

7:46 Tools for flower design

18:47 Petunia patterns

33:16 Engineering new traits

40:38 Turning Arabidopsis into pink micro-roses

54:26 Getting genes into plants

1:06:02 Mutant botanical gardens

1:14:24 Beauty is sufficient

1:20:30 Flower design studio