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Getting Lindera aggregata to produce morphine??

D

daddysgone

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Oct 22, 2007
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Hi,
I made this post at the end of the mulungu thread here at ADD, but it was totally off topic and so I decided to move it here, to a thread of its own.
Ok, so this might be a bit far-fetched, but given reticuline's place in the pathway from tyrosine to morphine, would it be even theoretically possible to insert the genes from papaver species which produce enzymes responsible for eventually converting reticuline into morphine, into the Lindera aggregata plant (which has a high concentration of reticuline), and get this plant to produce morphine?-DG

I know that our technology in this field is a far way off, but in theory, might this be a possibility? Im not sure if other plants aside from Lindera aggregata produce reticuline, but it is quite abundant in this plant species. Thanks-DG
 
in theory, yes you can insert any gene. the hard part is :finding the gene of interest, isolating it, figuring out how it is regulated, doing all the benchwork to insert the gene in a place that will result in a plant that will survive. need a big lab and grad students. b
 
It's not that far off, but requires you to have all the genes in the biosynthetic pathway and then you have to clone them, then insert them into the plant... Which is probably years of work for one person, and you should probably have a bio-hood and a lot of other things. And there's pretty much no small non-suspicious place you could acquire biological specimen samples from to work with for the gene cloning.

And there's not really a big reason to be doing it, since it's so easy to just acquire and grow poppies themselves as it is. I mean, I've seen P. somniferum growing on countrysides. I mean, if you did it, the industry would pretty much say, "So what?" A more interesting experiment would be to engineer customized enzymes to convert thebaine into say, hydromorphone or another more potent opiate that could save pharmaceutical companies some work and would be very patentable and applicable.
 
it might not be too ridiculously hard to engineer a bacteria to produce one enzyme (still hard). insulin is produced by bacteria now. at least with one small gene you can put it in a plasmid and dump it on millions of bacteria, hoping that one will take it. then that one will colonize. it would still be tough to isolate the gene of interest though.
 
Thanks for the responses.
I understand that attempting this would be difficult, costly, perhaps impossible at this point and time, and perhaps most importantly, it would essentially represent a solution to a problem that doesn't exist- meaning that poppies do a bang up job at producing morphine, and even if one were able to get Lindera aggregata to produce morphine, it would simply mean that that we now have the possibility to utilize an alternative to produce morphine, but one that offers no clear advantages and tons of disadvantages.

But......just because there dont seem to be any clear advantages in using this method now, things change, technology change, etc. Depending on how skilled we may become in terms of introducing foreign genes and manipulating enzymes, we might one day find that the yield might be far favorable using something like Lindera as opposed to traditional poppies, or that cultivating the morphine (a rather labor-intensive process with poppies) might prove to be easier, more practical, and require far less land space compared to what poppies require in these regards.

More important then these things though, is that important innovation often results only after earlier attempts which are initially costly, difficult, and offer no immediate advantage over the tried and true method.

Today we are strongly pursuing alternate forms of energy which, at the moment, are less efficient and far more costly then the old stand-by, oil. But obviously the goal is that this early research will eventually lead to alternatives which ultimately prove to be a great improvement on our current model. I understand the major difference in this comparison is that regarding energy, our current system in unsustainable and we are therefore required to find alternatives before things become dire, whereas with morphine, there is no clear problem with our current method of utilizing poppies. But still, there is always ways things can be improved, and no advances will ever occur if we opt not to investigate solely on the basis of our satisfaction with the status quo.-DG
 
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