Denatured nature

Don’t fool Mother Nature. Unless you are trying to make more efficient pharmaceutical compounds occurring “naturally” from plants. Whether it’s tree bark for aspirin or flowers like Echinacea, man has long tapped into botanicals for healing powers. Now man is tapping a little harder by genetically engineering them to produce unnatural varieties of what they do best.

Associate Professor Sarah O/Connor from MIT has added bacterial genes to a periwinkle plant which enables it to produce more powerful alkaloids used in pharmaceuticals. The alkaloids can make medicine more effective and last longer in the body.

The primary target of the research team was to increase production of a alkaloid called vinblastine which is used in cancer treatments. “We’re trying to use plant biosynthetic mechanisms to easily make a whole range of different iterations of natural products,” she said. “If you tweak the structure of natural products, very often you get different or improved biological and pharmacological activity.”

In the continuing research, O’Connor and her team want to engineer full periwinkle plants to produce even more novel compounds. They also want to improve the production or overall yield from the periwinkle plant to about 15 times higher than what the plant creates without man’s help. While they are only tooling the periwinkle now, it’s possible these techniques can be applied to other plants for other purposes.

Source: MIT, ScienceDaily.