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Gene splicing to mass-produce opium?

C

Cecil

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Joined
Jan 17, 2004
Messages
166
All the GM foods sprouting up nowadays (vitamin enriched rice, frost-resistant strawberries, etc, etc, etc) have me thinking: is it possible to splice the gene responsible for producing opium into yeast? Or perhaps even into bacteria, as is done for insulin production?

Of course, even if it's possible it's not likely to be looked kindly upon by the DEA. It would, however, mean that anyone could produce opium in mass quantites in one's kitchen as easily as making cookies.
 
Yes, possible. Morphine, THC, DMT, nicotine, cocaine.... all possible, infact, I believe there are some human neuroblastoma cell lines (SH-SY5Y) which produce morphine all on their own...
 
Putting the genes that make morphine into yeast.

That is a very interesting idea. Somebody should try it.
 
Granted, it isn't the same thing at all, but I do recall an acticle about tomato plants being grafted onto tobacco plants. The tomatos contained nicotine, but at concentrations high enough that you wouldn't want to eat one.

I doubt it's possible, but I'm just thinking how nice it would be to eat a morphine/codiene-enriched banana or something.
 
There are a couple of challenges to this sort of thing.

1. Identify enzymes that can produce the desired product.

2. Get the genes for these enzymes into your organism.

3. Will the product be readily metabolized by or toxic to your organism? If so, additional work will be needed. (Marijuana is an interesting example in that it produces much of its THC in a location that isolates it from the rest of the plant's metabolism (on the trichome hairs on the buds.))

In many cases, nature has already done the work for us; we have organisms that produce all manner of interesting materials, such as mescaline, cocaine, morphine, DMT, safrole, ephedrine, etc. (I heard that a plant that produced traces of meth had been found, but can't find a reference....)

I would bet vast sums of money that this represents the future of the drug trade, although it's probably a few decades off. When the day comes when a tiny sample of desiccated cells in a mailed letter can be grown in multi-kilo vats of cocaine- or morphine-producing yeast with little more than sugar and water, the drug war will become even less effective. (With fungi or bacteria, you wouldn't even need the power-hungry lighting systems that often trip up large-scale pot growers.)

This is a very doable project. With advances in biotech, basic forms could probably be built on a modest budget (perhaps as little as a few thousand dollars if you already had access to lab space/equipment.)
 
Bullshit! It is not going to be that easy. GM crops could still produce 'high yield' plants. That has got to be more sophisticated than crude mutagenesis and natural selection.
 
^ To put it in a bactaria would not be that hard, once the enzymes that were required were sequenced. <--- and hence you could pull out the cDNAs easily.
 
i understand what you are saying. the vector for this could be alikened to a virus carrying the genes for opium production and to 'hijack' the biological machinery in the bacteria and use the factory workfloor for the production of morphine. it is a very palatable idea, but i just dont forsee that it will be that easy to achieve in practice.

bioengineers get alot of money and most of it is going down the sink.
 
splicing the genes of marijuana and hops .doesn't sound hard at all. im on the team.
 
I realize this is an old thread, but opium is already mass produced. Sure, GM crops could produce a better per-acre harvest, but poppies seem to grow well in their designated areas. Synthetics are cheaper and more potent, and semi-synthetic thebaine derivatives are more potent than codeine/morphine.

Still codeine is used in massive quantities. I believe codeine and dihydrocodeine are the most consumed opiates. In fact most pharmaceutical codeine is not simply extracted/isolated from poppies, and instead is a product of morphine o-methylation. They are working on GM poppies that produce mainly or mostly codeine by messing with the O-demethylase gene (similar to how they get high thebaine content with the 6-O-demethylase gene).

I dont think we will see an implementation of faster growing non-poppy crops that produce opiates in the near future...
 
yaesutom said:
While your at it, even better, LSD :)
Click to expand...

See, now this is going to be a little harder. For starters, LSD isn't found anywhere in nature (that we know of) so you would have to build the enzyme from scratch, something we don't have the technology to do yet, at least clandestinely.

However, simple naturally occurring hallucinogens could be made this way relatively easily.

Let's use gene splicing to make a variety of cannabis that also produces DMT *drools*
 
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