Meet the Plant Hacker who creates never-before-seen (or smelled) flowers

The money he earned from that was enough to put Cocioba through the first two years of his biology degree at Stony Brook University. He ended up working in a neglected plant biology group that taught him to do experiments on a shoestring budget. “We used toothpicks and yogurt dishes to make petri dishes and that everything,” he says. But financial difficulties forced him to drop out. Before he left, his one of the labs passed him a tube of Agrobacterium, a microbe commonly used to engineer new traits in plants.

Petunia cultivated by Sebastian Cocioba, a plant biotechnology researcher, working in his home lab in Huntington, New York, on October 30, 2024.Lanna Apisukh

A rack of cultivated plants under grow lights at Sebastian Cochioba’s home on Oct. 30, 2024. The plant biotechnology researcher built a lab in his home where he works in Huntington, New York.Lanna Apisukh

Test tubes of petunias under a grow light in Huntington, New York, on October 30, 2024. The flowers were developed by plant biotechnology researcher Sebastian Cocioba, who works in his home lab.Lanna Apisukh

Cochioba started turning his hallway into a makeshift lab. He realized he could buy cheap equipment at fire sales and sell it for a markup. He later learned to 3D print relatively simple pieces of equipment sold at extreme markups.The lightbox used to visualize DNA, for example, can be cobbled together with some cheap LEDs. with a piece of glass and a light switch. The same device would sell for hundreds of dollars. “I have this 3D printer, and it’s the most reliable technology for me,” Cocioba says.

All this confusion helped Cocioba’s main mission to become a flower designer. “Imagine you’re the Willy Wonka of flowers, without the sexism, the racism, and the weird little slaves,” he says rating, so it doesn’t subject Cocioba or his lab to onerous regulations.He says that in the UK or It is impossible to do genetic editing as an amateur in the EU.

Cocioba has positioned herself as a “pipette for hire,” working for startups to develop scientifically provable ideas. In the run-up to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, plant biologist Elizabeth Henoff asked Cocioba to help with a project she was working on. design a morning glory flower in the pattern of the blue-and-white checkerboard. It just so happened that there was already a checkerboard flower in nature. Cochioba wondered if he could introduce some genes from that plant into the morning glory. that the snakehead fritillary had one of the largest genomes on the planet and had never been sequenced.” The project collapsed around the Olympics with heartache because we couldn’t execute on it.”

A close-up view of Petunia tissue culture grown by plant biotechnology researcher Sebastian Cocioba based in Huntington, New York on October 30, 2024.Lanna Apisukh

Test tubes of frozen DNA and plant enzymes in the home laboratory of plant biotechnology researcher Sebastian Cocioba, based in Huntington, New York, on October 30, 2024.Lanna Apisukh

As Cocioba moved deeper into the world of synthetic biology, he began to shift his focus slightly away from simply creating new species of plants and toward unlocking the tools of science itself. He now documents his experiments in an online notebook that is free for anyone to use. He also started selling some plasmids, small circles of plant DNA, which he uses to transform flowers.

“We’re definitely in the golden age of biotechnology,” he says. Access is greater and the research community is more open than ever before , where hobbyist scientists shared their materials in part just for the thrill of creating new plant varieties. “You don’t have to be a professional scientist to do science,” Cocioba says.

Along with this work, Cochioba is also a project scientist at California-based startup Senseory Plants. The company wants to design indoor plants to produce unique scents, a biological alternative to candles or incense sticks smells like old books, turning an olfactory room into an old library The startup explores an entire landscape of evocative scents, it says is Kochioba, developed in part in his home lab. “I really, really love what they’re doing.”

This article appears in the January/February 2025 issue WIRED UK magazine.