News Section | Health
Sleeping poppies stripped of their opium
Researchers have hobbled the opium poppy’s ability to make morphine and in the process turned it into a source of new pharmaceutical compounds. As reported in the December issue of Nature Biotechnology, an Australian team engineered the poppy Papaver somniferum (roughly translated as ‘sleep-inducing’ poppy) so that it is incapable of accumulating morphine and codeine, two of the most abundant opiates present in the plant’s dry latex – the poppy’s natural sap-like substance. Instead, these plants accumulate large amounts of the nonnarcotic alkaloid reticuline, a compound of interest as a precursor for several antimalarial and anticancer drugs.
Larkin and colleagues then reengineered P. somniferum by eliminating the last step in the morphine/codeine biosynthetic pathway, using a process called RNA silencing in which short pieces of RNA target mRNA copies of a gene for destruction. Their work shows that by using this technique, alkaloid production in plants can be efficiently redirected to create plants capable of producing chemicals of pharmaceutical interest.(Nature Biotechnology)
Selected Books from Amazon:
