luciferin

The plant doesn't produce any glowing bits (luciferase, luciferin) by itself, but is injected using high pressure.

That means if you were to produce say 200 lm (about the output of a 40W incandescent light bulb) you'd need kilo's of ATP and Luciferin a week.

It's not trivial to generate the necessary luciferin/luciferase, but adding GFP is a basic project.

However, unlike fluorescent proteins, luciferases do not require an external light source, but do require addition of luciferin, the consumable substrate.

A group of colleagues and I planning an attempt to elucidate some of the luciferin synthesis genes in our spare time.

Or is the plant photographed biosynthesizing its own luciferin?

These nanoparticles are the enzymes and substrates for a luciferin reaction, which uses the plant's energy in the form of ATP to power the reaction, giving off light.

Luciferase, luciferin, and Co-Enzyme A Who named these?

Is that with or without luciferin added?

Did the luciferin/luciferase metabolic pathway get elucidated?

Thirdly, as far as I can tell from your scientific posts on your blog, you are still feeding the plant luciferin (the glow-in-the-dark chemical), in the photo that that the WSJ showed.

I considered trying some napkin-math for how many calories Rudolph would need to burn running a luciferin reaction like a firefly, but immediately stumbled over the issue of many lumens the FAA would consider acceptable.

Luciferin is converted to a reactive intermediate by the enzyme luciferase in a reaction that uses ATP (produced by mitochondria), this intermediate reacts with O2 to produce light.

Luciferin isn't what makes jellyfish glow, that's GFP.

Luciferin really produces light from chemical energy.