Ever since humans first noticed the idea - alter effects of poppy , we ’ve planted vast theater of operations of the flowers to make drug that range from the legal ( morphia ) to the illegal ( diacetylmorphine ) . Some of our strong legitimate pain pill still originate in these large , clunky , and vexing - to - regulate poppy fields . But what if we could just brew tub of morphine - making barm ?
A newstudy published inNature Chemical Biologybuilds on a singular bit of biotechnology . Poppies make opium , which is further refined into analgesic like morphine , codeine , hydrocodone , and oxycodone in chemical factories . A team at Stanford University led by Christina Smolke wants to pack the entire production process — poppy field and chemical factory included — into a unmarried yeast mobile phone .
The unconscious process ask about 17 chemical reactions . The difficulty lies getting each chemical reaction to go off in just the right order inside a barm cell . unwashed bread maker ’s yeast is inserted with additional genes that encode enzymes carrying out each of the those chemical reactions . But a soup of enzyme inside the cubicle is n’t enough — some reactions require complex structures to pass right . Smolke ’s squad also had to recreate “ poppy - corresponding chemical neighborhoods ” inside the yeast cell .
In this raw newspaper , Smolke demonstrate how to make barm that manufactures various opiate like morphine and codeine from a molecule called thebaine . And previously , her squad had engineered yeast to make a sugar molecule that is the precursor to thebaine . If they can just bridge over this lose link , yeast might one day replace poppy fields and morphine plants — an entire factory in a cell . [ Nature Chemical BiologyviaChemistryWorld , Stanford ]
Top image : Beror / shutterstock
Drugssynthetic biology
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