One tomato instead of 50 bottles of red wine
Geneticists have created rejuvenating GM tomatoes
RIA News British geneticists have developed a new variety of transgenic tomatoes, whose pulp contains a large amount of resveratrol, a powerful antioxidant from red wine that can slow down aging and the development of Alzheimer's disease, according to an article published in the journal Nature Communications (Zhang et al., Multi–level engineering facilitates the production of phenylpropanoid compounds in tomato, in open access – VM).
"Plants important for medicine are often difficult to grow, and they usually take a very long time to produce the substances we need. Our research gives us a fantastic platform for the rapid production of these nutrients in tomatoes. They can be extracted directly from the juice of these tomatoes," said Yang Zhang from the John Innes Center in Norvik (in a press release John Innes Centre Scientists produce beneficial natural compounds in tomato – with potential for industrial scale up – VM).
Zhang and his colleagues took the first step towards the production of the most important biochemicals and medicines with the help of conventional cultivated plants, studying the work of one of the genes of the Arabidopsis thaliana (Arabidopsis thaliana), a wild relative of cabbage, which scientists use as a plant analogue of laboratory mice.
The genome of this plant, as scientists say, contains the AtMYB12 gene, which contains instructions for assembling a protein that controls how many substances "linked" to it will be collected by plant cells.
The authors of the article transplanted this section of DNA into the genome of ordinary tomatoes and modified it in such a way that it stimulated fruit cells to produce two useful substances – antioxidants resveratrol and genistein. Both of these substances are found inside grapes and garden beans, from whose DNA scientists extracted the genes responsible for their synthesis and transplanted them into the genome of tomatoes.
As the first experiments with similar GM tomatoes showed, they are capable of producing medicines in industrial quantities - for example, one tomato contained as much resveratrol as is present in 50 bottles of red wine, and as much genistein as there is in 2.5 kilograms of beans.
Such a great success, according to Zhang, suggests that a similar technique can be used for the production of other herbal components of medicines, which today remain too expensive due to problems with the cultivation of raw materials. Such "medicinal GMOs" can be used for their intended purpose, both by simply eating them and extracting the active substance from them, scientists conclude.
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27.10.2015