Planimal Cells

Can you imagine generating your own energy while simply sunbathing? While such a scenario is fantastical, the idea of creating mammalian cells that can photosynthesise does have potential real-world biotechnological applications – such as the provision of oxygen (a by-product of photosynthesis) within engineered tissues to enable larger production volumes. The mammalian cells pictured are hamster ovary cells – a robust cell line used in many molecular biology laboratories – and the chloroplasts they contain (magenta) were isolated from the red alga Cyanidioschyzon merolae. After introducing the chloroplasts into the hamster cells, they were capable of photosynthetic activity for at least two days, during which the cells exhibited increased growth compared with controls. Although the organelles degraded after a couple of days, this proof-of-principle experiment is the first to show photosynthetic activity of chloroplasts within mammalian cells, and thus serves as a foundation for developing and improving photosynthetic animal cells in the future.

Written by Ruth Williams

Ruth Williams

Writer

Ruth is a freelance science journalist based in the US. She's a regular correspondent for The Scientist, and her work has appeared in The Lancet, Nature, Scientific American Mind, BBC Focus and elsewhere. Twitter @rooph

Website

• Image from work by Ryota Aoki and colleagues
• Department of Integrated Biosciences, Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, The University of Tokyo, Kashiwa, Chiba, Japan
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution – NonCommercial – NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
• Published in Proceedings of the Japan Academy, Series B, October 2024