Meet the plant hackers who create flowers you’ve never seen (or smelled) before

The money he earned was enough to get Kochova through the first few years of his biology degree at Stony Brook University. He completed a stint in a neglected plant biology group where he was taught to experiment on a limited budget. “We were using toothpicks and yogurt cups to make Petri dishes and things like that,” he says. But due to financial difficulties, he had to drop out. Before he left, one of his labmates handed him a tube of Agrobacterium. Agrobacterium is a microorganism commonly used to incorporate new properties into plants.

Kočova began converting a corner of her hallway into a makeshift laboratory. He realized he could buy cheap equipment from labs that were closing down and sell them at a markup. “It’s given me a little bit more income,” he says. He then learned how to 3D print relatively simple equipment that sold at extreme markups. For example, a light box used to visualize DNA may be a combination of inexpensive LEDs, glass, and light switches. The same equipment would be sold to laboratories for a few hundred dollars. “I have this 3D printer, and it’s the most enabling technology for me,” Kociova says.

All of these tweaks were made to help Kochova with her main mission: to become a floral designer. “Imagine being a flowery Willy Wonka, without the sexism and racism and the weird little slaves,” he says. In the United States, genetically modified flower products are subject to minimal biosafety assessments, so Kociova and his lab are not subject to onerous regulations. He says it would be impossible to carry out gene editing as an amateur in the UK or EU.

Kochova sets herself up as a self-described “pipette for hire,” working to develop scientific proofs of concept at start-up companies. In the run-up to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, plant biologist Elisabeth Henaf asked Kociova for help with a project she was working on: designing morning glory flowers in the Olympic blue and white checkerboard pattern. Ta. By chance, a checkerboard flower already existed in nature – the fritillary fritillary. Kosiova wondered if it would be possible to introduce some of the plant’s genes into morning glory. Unfortunately, it turns out that this snake-headed leopard has one of the largest genomes on Earth, but it has never been sequenced before. As the Olympics approached, the project fell through. “Of course, it ended with a heartbreak, because we couldn’t do it.”

As Kochova got deeper into the world of synthetic biology, she began to change her focus slightly. We moved away from simply creating new types of plants and began to focus on opening up the tools of science itself. He now records his experiments in an online notebook that is free for anyone to use. He also began selling several plasmids (small rings of plant DNA) for use in flower transformation.

“We are definitely in a golden age of biotechnology,” he says. Access has improved and the research community is more open than ever. Kochova is trying to recreate something like the amateur plant breeder boom of the 19th century. In this boom, hobby scientists shared their materials partly for the thrill of creating new varieties of plants. “You don’t have to be a professional scientist to do science,” Kociova says.

Alongside this work, Kociova is also a project scientist at California-based startup Senseory Plants. The company wants to engineer houseplants to produce unique scents, a biological alternative to candles and incense sticks. One idea he’s playing with is designing plants to smell like old books, turning a room into an ancient library through the sense of smell. Kociova says the startup is studying the entire olfactory landscape of evocative scents, some of which were designed in her home lab. “I really, really love what they’re doing.”

This article appears in the January/February 2025 issue of the magazine. British magazine “WIRED”.