14 DAY TRIAL // Students and teachers who enjoy playing with substances in their laboratories have found a way to bring vitamin A to people who don't normally like eating fruit or vegetables.
They have come up with a new kind of bread loaded with beta-carotene, hoping that their breakthrough will help millions of people worldwide stay healthy.
“It looks exactly like normal bread.There's no orange color or anything because the yeast only makes up a very small part of the bread,” declared Arjun Khakhar, a junior biomedical engineering student at Johns Hopkins University.
This innovative item is one of the 60 projects which have been selected for the 2011 International Genetically Engineered Machine competition which will be hosted at the beginning of November by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The peculiar yet quite beneficial bread will have to compete with other remarkable breakthroughs, such as the bacteria that fights soil erosion, the bacteria that helps produce diesel compounds and a different kind of E. Coli which is supposed to clean up heavy metals.
Despite the fact that winning would represent a major achievement for the participants, the main goal is to create a product that manufacturers will be able to produce on a large scale, since “it is useless to develop something if nobody uses it,” as Khakhar pointed out.
In order to comply with present regulations, the staff had to control their cravings and their need to brag with the taste of their new product, because the present legislation prohibits the consumption of non-approved genetically modified foods.
After completing the task, the next objective is to launch this innovative beta-caroten improved bread on the market, which can turn out to be quite difficult, since to gain the acceptance of a genetically modified product has been proven to be a daunting task.