14 DAY TRIAL // For countless centuries, people have been using plants as natural remedies for a wide range of disease, and some of the compounds found in nature proved to be very effective. Now, researchers are engineering plants that can produce unnatural variants of the drugs they usually create.
This could be of great importance to the huge variety of medicinal compounds that plants generally produce, and could make drug synthesis even more viable. A lot of the world's modern drugs are based on compounds that were originally derived from flowers.
Chemists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are leading the way in this genetic engineering effort. Their team is led by Sarah O’Connor, an associate professor at the Institute.
The group has already began work on the periwinkle plant, to which they added a certain set of bacterial genes artificially. The organism usually produces a class of chemical compounds called alkaloids.
With the new genes, it is now possible for the periwinkle to attach chlorine, bromine, or other halogens to the list of chemicals included in their basic set of alkaloids.
In regular drugs, halogens are used to boost the chemicals' efficiency, or to increase their life span inside the though environment of the human body. A large portion of all antibiotics contain halogens.
“We’re trying to use plant biosynthetic mechanisms to easily make a whole range of different iterations of natural products,” O'Connor says of the team's efforts.
“If you tweak the structure of natural products, very often you get different or improved biological and pharmacological activity,” she goes on to say.
The MIT team, which also includes graduate student Weerawat Runguphan and former postdoctoral associate Xudong Qu, provides additional details on the engineered periwinkle plants in a paper that was published in the November 3 online issue of the top scientific journal Nature.
“There has been a lot less effort to engineer plants to produce things that could be of even more value. One reason for that is that plants tend to be complicated,” says expert Edward Eisenstein.
“They’re not as simple to manipulate as bacteria or yeast or even simple fungi,” adds the scientist, who is an associate professor at the University of Maryland (UM) Biotechnology Institute.
“This is a very nice study that might get more people to think about engineering plants rather than using them as a source of genes,” adds the expert, who was not involved in the research.
The new MIT investigation was made possible by grant money secured from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the American Cancer Society (ACS).