How to Design Flowers — Nick Desnoyer

Nick Desnoyer, a plant biologist in Norwich, England, is designing and creating flowers that don’t exist anywhere in nature. In today’s episode, he reveals his next project: Paintunia, a petunia that acts as a living canvas. Nick has engineered these petunias to include an inducible gene. When he lightly touches their buds with a clear molecule called dexamethasone, the molecules seep into cells, switch on the gene, and cause them to make a pigment. The result is a paintable flower, where molecules literally control which colors show up in particular places. Nick’s plan is ultimately to engineer these petunias to express three separate inducible genes, or biosynthetic pathways, for cyan, magenta, and yellow. For a prior project, Nick turned Arabidopsis, a small (and quite ugly) plant that researchers commonly use in research, into little pink “micro-roses.”We filmed this episode surrounded by flowers. Nick patiently explained to me how each one gets its shape and pigmentation; how he combines breeding and genetic engineering to make new 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 full of weird and wonderful flowers that exist nowhere else.Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.Sponsor: Plasmidsaurus offers whole-plasmid, amplicon, genome, and RNA sequencing. Place an order online, drop your sample in a drop box, and receive results with analysis the next morning. They handle the complete sequencing workflow so you can focus on the science. Sign up today at plasmidsaurus.com.1:28 Paintunia7:46 Tools for flower design18:47 Petunia patterns33:16 Engineering new traits40:38 Turning Arabidopsis into pink micro-roses54:26 Getting genes into plants1:06:02 Mutant botanical gardens1:14:24 Beauty is sufficient1:20:30 Flower design studioDesnoyer: I would like to create a botanical garden that you walk into and you don’t just appreciate the flowers, but you actually understand them a bit deeper through a scientific lens. I want these flowers to only exist there. I want them to be weird and wonderful. When you walk through this garden, you get that feeling of magic in that when you walk through the garden, you’ll be forced to take a closer look at what’s going on. That once you leave this garden, you want to take a closer look at nature.McCarty: I’m extremely excited for today’s interview, which is with Nick Desnoyer. He’s a plant biologist in the United Kingdom; a postdoctoral fellow at the Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich, England, which is where we’re filming today. But more famously online, he’s known as a flower designer in that he designs and then creates his own types of flowers using breeding, mutations, and genetic engineering. If you can watch this interview on YouTube, that’s probably the best option because we have a lot of props. There’s a lot of flowers that we’re going to talk about. And let’s just get into it. Welcome, Nick.Desnoyer: Thanks for having me. Very excited to be here.McCarty: Let’s just start with the announcement. You’re working on a new project. You haven’t revealed it yet. Tell me about that.Desnoyer: I haven’t actually talked about this project that I’ve been working on for a bit. It’s my next big project after the micro-rose. It’s called the Paintunia. The whole vision of the Paintunia is that it’s a living canvas. In contrast to a normal canvas that you would paint onto that’s made of dead plants, fiber and cotton, this is a living canvas that you actually direct it to paint itself. And I think there’s a lot of magic in that, which we can maybe get into.McCarty: How does it actually work? It’s an engineered line of petunia, and tell me about it. We have it on camera.Desnoyer: We have it here. This is the first version. There’s going to be many iterations. The final concept is that you would add three different inducer molecules. These are small molecules that you can treat to the floral bud at different stages and different concentrations. And based on those treatments, you direct transcription factors that lead to the expression of pigment biosynthesis genes that become turned on after about 16 hours. And so in a way, you’re orchestrating the gene expression of the flower and you get some feedback from the flower after you’ve treated it to see how the molecules diffuse through the flower. How is it responding to different pigments being produced in the same place? Things like that.McCarty: This is one of the flowers here. And so this is not actually a flower that you made, right? It’s from a 20-year-old science paper, research paper.Desnoyer: Yeah.McCarty: But they basically made an engineered line of petunia that when you paint it with this small molecule called dexamethasone, it turns those regions pink as the flower opens. And so you get this. This flower has actually been painted.Desnoyer: We have a few more of them as well. You can see that you can make different patterns based on how you treat it. And so I want this flower to really become a medium for art, where the flower really becomes the canvas. I’m calling it Paintunia because it’s based on Petunia hybrida, which is probably the second most studied flower in the world just after Arabidopsis. But there’s a lot more known about the colors in Petunia versus Arabidopsis. It’s the most studied in that realm. And what’s really nice about it is you see you have these five fused petals that are papery thin. They’re like three cell layers thick. And so it really seems like a perfect canvas.McCarty: You want to take this line essentially that somebody had already developed and you want to add more colors so that there’s different small molecule inducers that would turn on a cyan, a yellow. How hard do you think that’s actually going to be?Desnoyer: This might actually be the first time that you have a flower producing all of these different classes of pigments. For example, flowers that make betalains don’t typically make anthocyanins. And so we don’t necessarily know how those blends of colors are going to look.McCarty: But what color is a betalain? What color is an anthocyanin?Desnoyer: Right. Because this will be a living canvas for painting, it needs three major colors, cyan, magenta, and yellow. And with this, you can make blends to reach the entire color spectrum. Right now I have magenta, which is anthocyanins, but I’m going to eventually make this to be the cyan, or at least try and get close to cyan. For cyan, I’m going to now cross this to ornamental varieties that are a bit more blue. A mauve. Actually, I think we have one here.

Yeah.