Sebastión Cocioba’s clapboard house on Long Island doesn’t look like a state-of-the-art plant biology laboratory. However, when you enter and take a look down the hallway, you see a small corner with enough space for a single scientist. The workshop is filled with equipment that Cocioba bought on eBay or that he improvised himself with some engineering knowledge. This is where this 34-year-old uses gene editing to create new types of flowers that are more beautiful and sweeter smelling than those that currently exist.; and it is also where he hopes to open wide the closed world of genetic engineering.
Cocioba’s fascination with plants began in his childhood, when he became captivated by the intricate internal structure of a fallen maple leaf. In high school he saw a container full of orchids in the doorway of a Home Depot store; He took the plants, his mother’s favorites, and made them bloom with the help of a growth hormone paste purchased on the Internet. Soon he began selling them to the store: “I dedicated myself to collecting their trash, making it flower and selling it,” he says.
With the money he earned, Cocioba paid for the first two years of biology at Stony Brook University in New York. He spent time in an abandoned plant biology group that taught him how to experiment on a shoestring budget: “We used toothpicks and yogurt cups to make Petri dishes and all that,” he remembers. But economic difficulties forced him to desert. Before leaving, one of his lab mates gave him a tube of Agrobacteriuma microbe commonly used to create new traits in plants.
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From apprentice to master of plants
Cocioba set out to transform his corner of the hallway into a makeshift laboratory. He realized he could buy cheap equipment at clearance sales from laboratories that were closing and sell it at a profit: “That gave me a small source of income.” He later learned how to 3D print relatively simple pieces of equipment that sell at huge profit margins. For example, a light box for viewing DNA can be made with some cheap LEDs, a piece of glass, and a switch. “I have a 3D printer and it is the technology that has helped me the most.”
“Imagine being the Willy Wonka of flowers, without the sexism, racism and strange dwarfs,” he laughs. In the US, work with genetically modified flowers is covered by the lowest degree of biosafety, so Cocioba’s laboratory does not have to be subject to strict regulations: “Doing genetic editing as a hobbyist in the United Kingdom or the EU would be impossible.” “.
Cocioba calls himself a “pipette for hire” and works for startups developing scientific proofs of concept. On the eve of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, plant biologist Elizabeth Hénaff asked Cocioba for help with a project she was working on: designing a morning glory flower (Ipomoea purpurea) with the Games’ blue and white grid design. It so happened that a flower with this pattern already existed in nature: the snakehead fritillaria (Fritillaria imperialis). Cocioba thought of a way to import some of that plant’s genes into a morning glory. Unfortunately, the snakehead fritillaria had one of the largest genomes on the planet and had never been sequenced. With the Olympic Games just around the corner, the project collapsed: “I ended up heartbroken, we couldn’t execute it.”
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The best time for biotechnology
As Cocioba delved into the world of synthetic biology, his focus began to shift, moving away from simply creating new types of plants and toward the tools of science itself. He now documents his experiments in a notebook on-line free to use. He has also started selling some of the “plasmids”, small circles of plant DNA, which he uses to transform flowers.
“We are in the golden age of biotechnology,” he celebrates. Access is greater and the research community is more open than ever. Cocioba tries to recreate something similar to the rise of amateur ‘plant breeders’ in the 19th century, in which amateurs shared their materials just for the thrill of creating new varieties of plants: “You don’t have to be a professional scientist to do science,” he mentions. Cocioba.
In addition to this work, Cocioba is also a project scientist at the new Californian company Senseory Plants. The company wants to design houseplants that produce unique aromas, a biological alternative to candles or incense sticks. One of the ideas he’s playing with is designing a plant that smells like old books, olfactorily transforming a room into an old library. The startup you are exploring an entire olfactory landscape of evocative essences; many of them, designed in his home laboratory. “I love what we are doing,” he concludes.
Article originally published in WIRED. Adapted by Alondra Flores.
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