A Petunia bioengineered by Sebastian Cocioba, a plant biotechnology researcher who works out of his home laboratory in Huntington, New York on October 30, 2024.<\/span>Lanna Apisukh<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figure>\n\nA shelf of bio engineered plants under grow lights in Sebastian Cocioba’s home on October 30, 2024. The plant biotechnology researcher built a laboratory inside his home where he works out of in Huntington, New York.<\/span>Lanna Apisukh<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figure>\n\nTest tubes of Petunias under a grow light in Huntington, New York on October 30, 2024. The flowers were bioengineered by Sebastian Cocioba, a plant biotechnology researcher who works out of his home laboratory.<\/span>Lanna Apisukh<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\nCocioba set about transforming his hallway nook into a makeshift lab. He realized that he could buy cheap equipment in fire sales from labs that were shutting down and sell them on for a markup. \u201cThat gave me a little bit of an income stream,\u201d he says. Later he learned to 3D-print relatively simple pieces of equipment that are sold at extreme markups. A light box used to visualize DNA, for example, could be cobbled together with some cheap LEDs, a piece of glass, and a light switch. The same device would retail to laboratories for hundreds of dollars. \u201cI have this 3D printer, and it\u2019s been the most enabling technology for me,\u201d Cocioba says.<\/p>\n
All of this tinkering was in aid of Cocioba\u2019s main mission: to become a flower designer. \u201cImagine being the Willy Wonka of flowers, without the sexism, racism, and strange little slaves,\u201d he says. In the US, genetically modified flower work is covered by the lowest biosafety rating, so it doesn\u2019t subject Cocioba or his lab to onerous regulations. Doing gene-editing as an amateur in the UK or EU would be impossible, he says.<\/p>\n
Cocioba set himself up as a self-described \u201cpipette for hire\u201d\u2014working for startups to develop scientific proof-of-concepts. In the run-up to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, the plant biologist Elizabeth H\u00e9naff asked Cocioba for help with a project she was working on: designing a morning glory flower with the Games\u2019 blue-and-white checkerboard pattern. It just so happened that a checkerboard flower already existed in nature\u2014the snake\u2019s head fritillary. Cocioba wondered if he could import some of the genes from that plant into a morning glory. Unfortunately it turned out that the snake\u2019s head fritillary had one of the largest genomes on the planet and had never been sequenced. With the Olympics looming, the project fell apart. \u201cIt ended in heartbreak, of course, because we couldn\u2019t execute on it.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n
\nA close-up view of Petunia tissue culture grown by Sebastian Cocioba, a plant biotechnology researcher based in Huntington, New York on October 30, 2024.<\/span>Lanna Apisukh<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figure>\n\nTest tubes of frozen DNA and plant enzymes inside the home laboratory of Sebastian Cocioba, a plant biotechnology researcher based in Huntington, New York on October 30, 2024.<\/span>Lanna Apisukh<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\nAs Cocioba moved deeper into the world of synthetic biology, he started to shift his focus slightly\u2014away from just creating new kinds of plants and toward opening up the tools of science itself. Now he documents his experiments on an online notebook that\u2019s free for anyone to use. He also started selling some of the plasmids\u2014small circles of plant DNA\u2014that he uses to transform flowers.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re at the golden age of biotech for sure,\u201d he says. Access is greater, and the research community is more open than ever before. Cocioba is trying to recreate something like the 19th-century boom of amateur plant breeders\u2014where hobbyist scientists shared their materials partly just for the thrill of creating new plant varieties. \u201cYou don\u2019t have to be a professional scientist to do science,\u201d Cocioba says.<\/p>\n
Alongside this work, Cocioba is also a project scientist at the California-based startup Senseory Plants. The company wants to engineer indoor plants to produce unique scents\u2014a biological alternative to candles or incense sticks. One idea he\u2019s playing with is engineering a plant to smell like old books, olfactorily transforming a room into an ancient library. The startup is exploring a whole smellscape of evocative scents, Cocioba says, in part designed in his home laboratory. \u201cI really, really, love what they\u2019re doing.\u201d<\/p>\n
This article appears in the January\/February 2025 issue of<\/em> WIRED UK magazine.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The money he earned doing that was enough to put Cocioba through the first couple of years of a biology degree at Stony Brook University. He completed a stint with a neglected plant biology group that taught him to experiment on a shoestring budget. \u201cWe were using toothpicks and yogurt cups to do petri dishes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":611,"featured_media":13656,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[703],"tags":[1732,3146,3145,2162,890,3144,1333],"class_list":["post-13655","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology","tag-biology","tag-genetic-engineering","tag-genetics","tag-plants","tag-science","tag-synthetic-biology","tag-wired-uk"],"yoast_head":"\n
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