Hey, if you had funding you could totally go for it. I'm only familiar with likelihood of rare plant events because I'm always trying to get them in vain. Several years now with gene editing tools haha

It's still random chance. But you are of course right that you would get them faster than possible in what's typically considered natural.

No one really does this anymore though. Of course you can't select the radiation induced mutation or where or how many or how large or what you want it to do. Most give nothing useful whatsoever if they aren't just outright killed by the mutation.

You just would have to do literally billions of them and see if you can observe any type of desirable phenotype because there's no realistic way to do sequencing on that many.

Many traits are not regulated by single genes but on long pathways involving multi gene networks. These are complex and make it even more unlikely to obtain in any reasonable amount of time adding another layer of complexity

If you want a plant to glow and all you're doing hypothetically is irradiating them I think it would take much longer than you may initially expect.

Thank you for the enjoyable discussion by the way :)

I mean yeah if you can cause a specific selective pressure for the fluorescence trait and then breed the plant for 100 million years I guess you have a shot haha

Those fish are definitely badass though

It's crazy how even though the process will take that long theoretically I can make this gene insertion in a single day with modern transformation and gene editing tools

If the trait or edit is homozygous and you self pollinate the plant the trait will not be segregated out. If it is heterozygous you will get a mix.

When transforming plants you can get hetero or homozygous edits both. I am unsure the genotype of the firefly petunias though.

So if the edit is homozygous it is known as a pure line.

Nothing to do with rain. But it definitely does look cheerful

What to do if I already touched all my grass

That's true. Fluorescence is just metabolically expensive.

In each seed this gene would segregate some wouldn't express at all, some lower and if you did it more times more than likely the mutation would be lost

Not really. They transformed plant cells in a lab with GFP from a mushroom and established a stable transgenic line. This can't be done without modern techniques. Not the same as breeding them

Myostatin deficiency can really fuck you up though