The movie Avatar is absolutely worth seeing for its lush luminescent vegetation.

How did they do it?

A artificial plant

B Agrobacterium tumefaciens

No, it wasn’t an artificial plant.

A. tumefaciens, bacteria that cause crown gall, was used to insert the firefly’s luciferase gene into the tobacco genome.

Will the craze over Avatar create a market for luminescent plants and flowers? Only time will tell. It’s certainly possible with tobacco, but world with just shimmering tobacco would be boring. But wait, A. tumefaciens isn’t too fussy about its plant hosts. A recent survey by Marcel De Cleene and Jozef De Ley, molecular biologists in Belgium, confirmed that A. tumefaciens successfully infected 643 different types of plants (from 331 genera and 93 families). So, plant variety covered.

Go figure, avatar organisms are alive and well on earth. We just have to thank crown galls, fireflies and curious scientists.