BioEngineering - the potentials of brewing Opium using Yeasts (Stanford College Project)

[Bob]

MORE GMO RESEARCH

A solid research program has been happening for years now, to modify a yeast to become a full opiate factory, bypassing the need to have an opium plant grown, and the latex harvested.

(Source)

Associate Professor of Bioengineering Christina Smolke, has been leading the Stanford University team that has been genetically engineering yeast cells to reproduce the biochemistry of poppies with the ultimate goal of producing opium-based medicines, from start to finish, in fermentation vats.

The research was published in the August 24th, 2014 edition of Nature Chemical Biology.

Background:

Today legal poppy farming is restricted to a few countries:

• Australia,
• France,
• Hungary,
• India,
• Spain and
• Turkey

The 'legal' growing is supervised by the International Narcotics Control Board, which seeks to prevent opiates like morphine, for instance, from being refined into illegal heroin.

The biggest market for legal opiates, and their opioid derivatives, is the United States, where pharmaceutical factories use chemical processes to create the refined products that are used as pain-killing pills.

However poppies are not grown in significant quantities in the U.S., creating various international dependencies and vulnerabilities in the supply of these important medicines.

What Smolke's team has now done is to carefully reprogram the yeast genome—the master instruction set that tells every organism how to live—to behave like a poppy when it comes to making opiates.

The process involved more than simply adding new genes into yeast. Opioid molecules are complex three-dimensional objects. In nature they are made in specific regions inside the poppy. Since yeast cells do not have these complex structures and tissues, the Stanford team had to recreate the equivalent of poppy-like "chemical neighborhoods" inside their bio-engineered (GM) yeast cells.

It takes about 17 separate chemical steps to make the opioid compounds used in pills. Some of these steps occur naturally in poppies and the remaining via synthetic chemical processes in factories.

Smolke's team wanted all the steps to happen inside yeast cells within a single vat, including using yeast to carry out chemical processes that poppies never evolved to perform—such as refining opiates like thebaine into more valuable semi-synthetic opioids like oxycodone.

Further reading: http://phys.org/news/2013-10-uncover...ead-roles.html

University of Calgary scientists have discovered metabolic enzymes in the opium poppy that play "widespread roles" in enabling the plant to make painkilling morphine and codeine, and other important compounds. The discovery, by university researcher Peter Facchini and PhD student Scott Farrow, includes the first biochemical reaction of its kind ever reported in plants, which may also occur in garden-variety poppies and other plants.

[Bob]

GM modifying yeast is not new

Apparently to bypass some concerns about GMO foods, some folks have turned to modifying the organisms used in fermentation, i.e. 'yeast', so that useful byproducts are produced (for example, no longer alcohol for instance produced during the rising of breads..).. this yeast produces Vitamin A.

They say, they are not modifying the wheat, as could be done in another type of GMO, they modify the yeast to make a bread that "looks like" any other bread but has been 'fortified' in the fermentation process..

The undergrad students from John Hopkins University in the US produced this new yeast called: "VitaYeast".

They spliced into the bread yeast a synthetic DNA plasmid ring programmed to produce Beta Carotene.

They say they are planning on creating a "starter dough" that can be shared (and spread the yeast), to perpetuate the strain.

The ultimate goal is to have the yeasts produce all the essential nutrients that the human body needs. hmmm

The undergrads are saying the bread made with it, or the yeast itself cannot be consumed because it is not yet proven safe, nor received regulatory approval.

(Source)

The splicing technique isn't as complicated as the numerous steps to modify a yeast to produce Opium or its derivatives in the GM yeast, but the concept is the same. Yeast is a good engine for rapidly reproducing (fermenting).

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Could a special 'yeast' help to ferment and be used to brew a fantastically new beer? Possibly that question could be answered by a college student specializing in Bio-Engineering

How it Happened
The team was brought together to compete in the annual International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition, which challenges students to use synthetic biology to manipulate DNA into carrying out new tasks.

The students conduct their research in the lab of the School of Medicine's Jef Boeke, a leading yeast expert who is a professor of molecular biology and genetics, and worked with 10 faculty advisors from engineering and arts and sciences.

After successfully altering the yeast and producing their enhanced dough, the students purchased a small bread machine to test the results.

Research shows that people reject genetically engineered foods that didn't look, smell or taste like something familiar, so the ultimate test is to produce a recognizable loaf of bread using VitaYeast.

(Logic appears to be, then, hide that the yeast is genetically modified, but the "bread" is fine in other words)

Visit the Website: http://2011.igem.org/Team:Johns_Hopkins

Vitamin A and Vitamin C "yeast engines" have been synthetically created, or bio-engineered..

[Bob]

Making of the Hyper-Poppy

Glaxo Smith Kline, that UK biopharma firm eager to make MORE $$ from the Opium trade, has pointed out that Dr Christina Smolke's work in discovering the specific enzymes in the Opium Poppy, how they work, where they are located, will lead to genetically enhanced poppy, with much more opium yield.

"But yeast-made opiates may struggle to usurp opium poppies. Tim Bowser, head of opiate research and development at GlaxoSmithKline, says that the same understanding of opiates that is making this yeast technology possible is also helping to make opiate production more efficient in poppies. The yeast method will have to be highly efficient and low-cost before it could replace the plants, he says.

"Although the competition with natural opium is likely to be tough, the yeast method could also open up new possibilities. By tweaking the yeast's food, as well as the genes it expresses, Smolke says the technique could be used to produce new, and possibly better, opiates. Security could be boosted further by engineering the yeasts to require very particular growing conditions, and genetic barcoding could be used to trace illegal sources."

(Source)

The Journal reference is here: Journal reference: Nature Chemical Biology, DOI: 10.1038/nchembio.1613