WA News

Blue strawberries? A hobby of a different kind

Some people collect stamps, others get into creating fantasy sports teams and some even do burlesque dancing but a Perth university lecturer says more and more people are taking up a hobby which can result in glow-in-the-dark flowers and sweet-tasting Brussels sprouts.

Bio-hacking is where a person takes a plant or animal and changes it somehow and alters its characteristics.

Senior lecturer at Edith Cowan University's school of computer and security science Andrew Woodward who did his PHD in the field said experimenting with tissue cultures of plants was gaining popularity as a pastime.

He said he first realised the existence of bio-hacking outside the world of scientists in the mid 90s when he attended conferences on the topic and noticed home gardeners coming along to learn new techniques for growing their orchids.

Bio-hacking is used by scientists to come up with solutions.

Dr Woodward's research as part of his PHD looked at ways to make plants more resilient against salinity and jarrah dieback.


People who spend time bio-hacking as a hobby often do it to challenge themselves to create plants with certain attributes, which can be to create an aesthetically pleasing result or to push the boundaries and challenge the norms.

Dr Woodward said more people were bio-hacking because it was now more accessible to people.

"Twenty of 30 years ago you would've needed a fully kitted out lab," he said.

Now, Dr Woodward said, the tools used were basic lab items that were reasonably affordable and how-to information was readily available on the internet.

He said even a normal pressure cooker could be converted to sterilise equipment.

He said an entire plant could be grown from one cell of a plant and some hormone products.

"DNA is DNA is DNA, you can literally take one gene from one organism to express it in another," he said.

Mr Woodward said the difficulty was that some characteristics were multi-gene controlled, so it was not always a simple process.

While bio-hacking animals is a much more complex process which also poses a lot of ethical issues, Dr Woodward said the only thing people bio-hacking plants had to think about was to make sure any modified plants were not released into the wild.

The Department of Agriculture and Food was contacted to comment on what guidelines are in place for bio-hackers but did not respond.