[Blackthorn]

> And they've demonstrated an ability to take genes from things like jellyfish for e.g. autoluminescence, too.

This almost feels like bikeshedding but...to be fair, pretty much the first thing anybody does with a new work organism in biotech is make it glow and it's been that way long before CRISPR! There's just something about it that people find irresistible.

[dekhn]

I lost decades of my life chasing the dream of making things glow (more specifically: general germline mutation based on engineering). I agree the glowing tobacco plant was a sexy introduction to gene modification. Unfortunately doing anything non-trivial and actually useful (beyond the 'hello world' of a glowing plant) is really challenging.

[leggomylibro]

Sure, and the autoluminescent plants experiment didn't use CRISPR; I was just pointing out how versatile plants are.

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

[dragonwriter]

> There's just something about it that people find irresistible.

It's cheap to verify and demonstrate success, so it's a natural first, or at least early, application.

[mpatobin]

Its like making a todo app in a new language