Bob
26th August 2014, 23:39
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 (http://phys.org/news/2014-08-bioengineers-brewing-opioid-painkillers-opium.html))
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.
http://cdn.phys.org/newman/gfx/news/2013/24-researchersu.jpg
Further reading: http://phys.org/news/2013-10-uncover-metabolic-enzymes-widespread-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.
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 (http://phys.org/news/2014-08-bioengineers-brewing-opioid-painkillers-opium.html))
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.
http://cdn.phys.org/newman/gfx/news/2013/24-researchersu.jpg
Further reading: http://phys.org/news/2013-10-uncover-metabolic-enzymes-widespread-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.