The Next Olympics Mascot Might Have Been a Mutant Morning Glory
The 12th-floor apartment of one of Long Island City’s waterfront towers features both spectacular views of Manhattan and a small yet state-of-the-art bioengineering lab, tucked into the spare bedroom. Sebastian Cocioba, a 29-year-old college dropout and self-styled “plant hacker,” has lived there with his parents for the past decade. And, for the past three years, the condo has also been home to a top secret, gloriously quixotic enterprise: the project to genetically engineer a flower that would serve as the official mascot for the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games.
When I first visited, on a bright-blue morning in January, Cocioba led me into the kitchen. There, he used the baked-potato setting on the microwave to warm a flask filled with a gelatinous goop of agar, sugar, and fertilizer. Once heated, the mixture loosened up into a free-flowing, straw-colored liquid that smelled, coincidentally, of potato. Meanwhile, Cocioba opened the fridge, reaching into a drawer divided in half—deli meats and cheese on the left, hotel-shampoo-size bottles of chemicals on the right—to retrieve two vials of plant hormones. “Look, we eat these in pretty decent amounts in salad,” Cocioba said, in response to my raised eyebrows. “My parents have kind of gotten used to the whole concept of this by now.”
Down the hall, in the lab, Cocioba assumed the role of patient tutor, while I switched on the laminar flow hood, gloved up, and used a pipette to transfer each hormone, in a carefully measured ratio, to the agar jelly. My task for the day was to insert a small genetic sequence into a white petunia—a small but important step toward the larger goal. Our tool was a plant pathogen known as Agrobacterium tumefaciens, which hijacks its hosts by sending out small packages of membrane-wrapped DNA capable of inserting themselves into the other plant’s genome.
Cocioba and I prepared the petunia for infection: he by stripping off some leaves the day before and leaving them to sterilize overnight in a weak bleach solution, I by using a hole punch to cut out dozens of neat circles of leaf tissue that I then tweezered gently into petri dishes filled with our cooled, yellow jelly. The freshly injured leaves emitted a chemical distress signal that was undetectable to me but that Cocioba assured me would act as a red rag to the bullish Agrobacterium.
The genetic sequence we were hoping to infect them with was a probe, capable of finding and binding to a target sequence in the petunia’s DNA, and it held a tail of green fluorescent protein that would only unfold enough to glow once a successful bond had formed. Cocioba had ordered the probe online and stored the vial, containing a single clear droplet filled with enough genetic material for 50-odd experiments, in the freezer, beneath a bottle of vodka and some tater tots, until he was ready to add it to our batch of Agrobacterium.
Dosing the plant tissue with hormones was a warm-up for the main event: Together, the chemicals would return chunks of adult plant—tissue that had already become root, stalk, or leaf—back to an embryonic state. Post-infection, Cocioba would use the same hormones, in different ratios, to organize the cells in each proto-plant disc back into the constituent parts of a seedling that he could cultivate, and that, if
