The money he earned doing that was enough to put Cocioba through the first years of a biology degree at Stony Brook University. He completed a stint with an abandoned plant biology group that taught him how to experiment on a shoestring budget. “We used toothpicks and yogurt cups to make petri dishes and stuff,” he says. But economic difficulties forced him to abandon his studies. Before he left, one of his lab mates handed him a tube of agrobacterium, a microbe commonly used to engineer new attributes into plants.
A bioengineered petunia by Sebastián Cocioba, a plant biotechnology researcher working in his home laboratory in Huntington, New York, on October 30, 2024.Lanna Apisukh
A shelf of bioengineered plants under grow lights in Sebastián Cocioba’s home on October 30, 2024. The plant biotechnology researcher built a laboratory inside 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 bioengineered by Sebastián Cocioba, a plant biotechnology researcher working in his home laboratory.Lanna Apisukh
Cocioba set out to transform the corner of the hallway into an improvised laboratory. He realized he could buy cheap equipment on sale from laboratories that were closing and sell it at a profit. “That gave me a little bit of an income stream,” he says. He later learned to 3D print relatively simple equipment that sells for extreme prices. A light box used to visualize DNA, for example, could be improvised with some cheap LEDs, a piece of glass, and a light switch. The same device would sell to labs for hundreds of dollars. “I have this 3D printer and it has been the technology that has allowed me the most,” says Cocioba.
All of these tweaks were in aid of Cocioba’s main mission: to become a flower designer. “Imagine being the Willy Wonka of flowers, without the sexism, racism and strange little slaves,” he says. In the United States, work with genetically modified flowers is covered by the lowest biosafety rating, so it does not subject Cocioba or his laboratory to onerous regulations. Doing amateur gene editing in the UK or EU would be impossible, he says.
Cocioba called himself a “pipette for hire,” working for startups to develop scientific proofs of concepts. On the eve of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, plant biologist Elizabeth Hénaff asked Cocioba for help with a project she was working on: designing a morning glory flower in the Games’ blue-and-white checkerboard pattern. It so happened that a checkerboard flower already existed in nature – the snake-headed fritillaria. Cocioba wondered if he could import some of that plant’s genes into a bluebell. Unfortunately, it turned out that the snake-headed fritillary had one of the largest genomes on the planet and had never been sequenced. With the Olympic Games just around the corner, the project fell apart. “Of course, it ended in heartbreak, because we couldn’t execute it.”
A close-up view of Petunia tissue culture grown by Sebastian Cocioba, a plant biotechnology researcher based in Huntington, New York, on October 30, 2024.Lanna Apisukh
Test tubes of frozen DNA and plant enzymes inside the home laboratory of Sebastián Cocioba, a plant biotechnology researcher based in Huntington, New York, on October 30, 2024.Lanna Apisukh
As Cocioba delved deeper into the world of synthetic biology, he began to shift his focus slightly, away from simply creating new types of plants and toward opening up the tools of science itself. He now documents his experiments in an online notebook that anyone can use for free. He also began selling some of the plasmids (small circles of plant DNA) that he uses to transform flowers.
“Without a doubt we are in the golden age of biotechnology,” he says. Access is greater and the research community is more open than ever. Cocioba is trying to recreate something like the rise of amateur plant breeding in the 19th century, where amateur scientists shared their materials partly just for the thrill of creating new plant varieties. “You don’t have to be a professional scientist to do science,” says Cocioba.
In parallel to this work, Cocioba is also a project scientist at the California-based startup Senseory Plants. The company wants to design houseplants to produce unique aromas, a biological alternative to candles or incense sticks. One idea he’s toying with is designing a plant to smell like old books, olfactorily transforming a room into an antique library. The startup is exploring an entire olfactory landscape of evocative aromas, Cocioba says, partly designed in his home laboratory. “I really, really love what they’re doing.”
This article appears in the January/February 2025 issue of UK WIRED Magazine.