hello. i’m gonna propose some stats for the part. first of all, it would glow of course. you could be able to modify it to repel or attract species and how effective it is. its processes could be that it uses ATP to glow. maybe you can modify intensity of the light and it could also act as a light when in dark places. to further add to this, you can make it so that you can’t see at all in the dark if you don’t have it, and the chemosynthesiser would be able to point to more than one species per part.
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I am fairly sure for now the main functional purpose of the bioluminescent vacuole (in the 0.8.2 prototypes) is to increase the oxygen tolerance.
I suppose it could act as a signalling agent equivalent in the later stages.
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that does sound nice.
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I suppose it will be mostly used as a “decorative” part for now…
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It would be interesting if the bioluminescent vacuole also had effects with Radiation tolerance and Melanosomes.
What would be the scientific basis for that? No one has brought that up before and from my quick read of the bioluminescence Wikipedia page it said that bioluminescence evolved originally as a way to protect against oxygen. (and nothing about ionizing radiation)
How would that specifically work? Surely it couldn’t affect species that have no mechanism to detect the light? (which is sadly all microbes as on a microbial scale the bioluminescence light amount is very low, so hard to have a detector for it)
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Apparently, Vibrio harveyi does use bioluminescence for helping to repair DNA damage from UV radiation. This is not the same radiation found in Radioactive rocks. Perhaps Bioluminescent Vacuole could increase UV tolerance?
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Is it the case with many bioluminescent microbes instead of just one species to use the b-vacuole like that?
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