You say tomato. I say tomato. And in the future we both say thank you. For it is now possible for tomatoes to be genetically engineered to produce medicine to treat Parkinson’s disease.
New Atlas explains:
“Genetically reprogramming certain easily grown plants to generate molecules to use as medicine is not a particularly new idea. Instead of relying on big pharmaceutical companies to synthesize medicines and then deliver them around the world, this strategy combines local plant cultivation with low-cost, simple extraction procedures to offer communities their own production capabilities.
An Australian native tobacco plant is perhaps the most used biofactory due to a novel gene mutation it evolved that essentially switches off its immune system. That tobacco plant has since been engineered to produce everything from flu and polio vaccines to human anti-inflammatory proteins.
[Meanwhile] researchers from the John Innes Center in the UK have been working for several years to develop ways to turn tomatoes into tiny drug-producing biofactories as tomato plants are high-yield crops and can be easily grown in many parts of the world. The team’s latest innovation, recently published in the journal Metabolic Engineering, describes how tomatoes can be easily modified to produce L-DOPA, a drug vital to the treatment of Parkinson’s disease.”
But why stop there? If that aforementioned tobacco plant can produce vaccines and anti-inflammatory proteins perhaps there are other things it could produce as well. And other fruit, vegetables, and plants that we can use in a similar fashion to tomatoes. Maybe we could even use this method to help produce a vaccine for COVID-19?!
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