We all know that yeast has been used for years domestically, right from baking your daily bread to brewing your evening beers. Well, the researchers at Stanford are now working on use of synthetic biology and making yeast do much more than earlier. These scientists are not using the property of fermentation of the genetically altered yeast but they are using it to pump out a non -narcotic cough suppressant known as noscapine, which is sourced naturally from opium poppies.
It is known from ancient times that plants like opium have medicinal properties but at the same time extracting these compounds from such plants is not only time consuming but also dangerous. Additionally, growing this plant requires legal permissions and it can be carried out only in a particular geographical region. Another setback with poppy is that it takes a complete year to mature.
So the focus was to have an approach of unlocking the potential of it in a smart way. They came up with a solution of exclusively using the whole genes and not the plant. So they tried inserting 25 gene sequences from the poppy, bacteria and rats too. What they did here is, they replaced the original operating system of the cell with a lab designed one.
This bioengineered yeast gets an ability to churn out noscapine in high amounts that too only in a matter of three to four days. This drug is in use already in countries and continents like USA, South America, Europe, Canada and Asia even though it is not yet legally approved in the USA. There also have been preliminary studies around the drug and its ability to be a better alternative to chemotherapy for cancer patients due to its less toxicity.
As per the professor of bioengineering at Stanford, humans have the ability to not only make the molecules work faster and more efficiently but also create molecules by slightly modifying them to have additional values.
The team of researchers working on Noscapine, custom ordered various genes from commercial gene synthesis-company after creating the required ones on computer. They further tinkered with the sequences of genes in order to make them gel with each other.
According to them, it was a big feat because it was difficult to get genes to do what you want, otherwise typing out gene sequences, ordering them or even assembling them can be done by easily by anyone.
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