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"Tomacco" for opiates?

erosion

Bluelight Crew
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Oct 16, 2003
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This might be a silly question but I'm curious if its possible. The yields from opium plants after conversion to heroin aren't really that high compared to the number of plants you need per gram. Would it be possible to get an entirely different plant to produce opiate akloids? I remember reading about someone actually making "tomacco" on slashdot (tomatoes with nicotine). The content of nicotine was so high it made the plants pretty lethal. If this could be done with opiates perhaps the yields would be higher. Is this possible, or just nod induced science fiction?
 
Well what happened with that tomacco bit was that the tomato plants just absorbed nicotine from the soil, not produced it themselves. But yes, you could theoretically insert genes to produce morphine alkaloids into other plants and increase the yields, but the technology to do things like that is still primitive and unreliable at best.
 
tomacco is a reference to an episode of the Simpsons, svacheme. not anything that actually happened.
 
Living cells are the hardware. DNA is the software running on that hardware. Change the DNA and you can get the cells to do anything you want (assuming you know which changes to make.)

They already produce a number of medicines this way; for instance, human insulin for diabetics is produced by genetically engineered bacteria growing in vats.

There is absolutely no reason why the future of the drug trade will not be found in similar technology. In twenty years, we could see engineered yeast growing in tubs providing almost any sort of illegal drug. You could a have a morphine vat, a meth vat, etc...just add sugar on occasion and harvest some of the crop for drug extraction; nothing else would be needed.

The basic technology already exists; the main obstacle now would be picking the right genes. There are a few easy marks such as DMT that could probably be done today without much effort. A route to MDMA (or most of the 'research chemicals') would be considerably harder.

If you think the drug war isn't working now, imagine a future where you can just order a packet of yeast online (like pot seed dealers) and dump it in a Rubbermaid trash can of water and sugar and end up with a kilo of cocaine in a week. (Granted there'd be a pain-in-the-ass extraction process, but still...)
 
http://science.slashdot.org/science/03/11/03/2258257.shtml?tid=129&tid=134&tid=188

Which points to the original, which I didn't see immediately discredited, however one comment points to the citation Glavinic, R., 1956 Vegetative hybridization between tomato and tobacco. Priroda (Nature), Leningrad No. 11: 98-100.
Now I don't speak Russian, and don't have institutional access to that article, so I can't evaluate their methodology and results, so I'm inclined to believe at this point that something like tomacco actually has happened, in either of these forms. Perhaps if someone has access to this article they could post it for translation?
 
reticuline will be converted into morphine in the tobacco plant.
I went back to my state college library and tried to find the book on alkaloids from the 1970,s that outlined the study that I first learned of this bio-conversion from, they switched the chemistry and plant biology sections around, and while I found many other books on alkaloids I could not find this original source of info. this sucks. I think I wrote a letter to the entheogen review about this and listed the source material, so i will go over to where my ER's are stored and try and get the info online. a few people on this website want the source info to substantiate my claims, and I am coming up short, so, hopefully in time I will find what I believe was a study by german chemists that outlined this conversion of reticuline in tobacco plants, researched over 40 years ago.
 
If they can insert fish genes into a tomato plant in order to prolong the life of the tomato once picked, they should be able to insert some of the genes from the opium poppy into another plant. Thing is, you've got to insert enough genes to allow the biosynthesis to take place from a substance that normally occurs in the host plant; otherwise you're inserting a shitload of genes and that increases the likelyhood of the whole thing failing

They already produce a number of medicines this way; for instance, human insulin for diabetics is produced by genetically engineered bacteria growing in vats.

It's much easier using bacteria as hosts for the DNA as they have independant sections of DNA called plasmids that the appropriate genes can be inserted into. Putting them into a complex eukaryiotic plant is a whole different (read: more difficult) ball game
 
And mammallian cells allready have the DNA to product morphine anyway... you just need to get the promoters in the right place. Get a vat of SH5Y cells growing in the right way and your in business (though bactaria would be better than those sensitive sons of bitches.
 
After a particularly stange flu, Not too ill feeling but definately sick,with almost psychedelic overtones. I thought of using virii to implant desired drug genes into human cells. Mind you this was in the late seventies so not as much was public knowlege regarding gene engineering so I was toying with a Sci-Fi concept at the time. Now it has become a disticnt possibility. What if we could become our own endogenous drug source via activation of a artificialy implanted genetic code? We have many autonomic functions people have learned to control to certain degrees. Might this be a pathway to activation of the desired genes?
For instance someone with anxiety disorder could have the genes which govern natural GHB production tweeked so when a person became stressed the gene would activate and produce GHB until the stress level dropped.
Or one could learn a meditative state which would activate a gene which would produce copiuos DMT. Controling simple bodily functions could become triggers for a number of existing endogenous substances and could be achieved readily especialy as we become better at reading code. It would take being able to write clean genetic code to produce non-endogenous substances but give it 20 yrs and we should be able to pick a chemical profile which pleases us ( or more likely makes us better mindless automotons)
WR
 
For instance someone with anxiety disorder could have the genes which govern natural GHB production tweeked so when a person became stressed the gene would activate and produce GHB until the stress level dropped.

Ever seen the film 'The Terminal Man'? It's about implanting a chip into someone's (George Segal) brain to control psychotic rages by creating an electrical pulse in the area of the brain that calms him. In the end, because of a feedback loop, he finds his brain intentionally triggering pszychotic rages in order to be 'rewarded' with a calming electric pulse. In the end it kills him. It's always possible that by creating a system such as you suggested that's under the control of the autonomic N/S, you'll throw the body into a feedback loop that it can't escape from (so that all the body's activity goes into triggering anxiety/being rewarded with GHB production).

Dodgy area to be messing with
 
^^ also, what about the children of those people?

I don't think anything like that will ever be tested on humans, at least not in the near future! Unless someone clones hitler maybe he he 8(
 
Wouldn't it be more feasible to insert the morphine making genes into the plasmids of prokaryotes?

Morphine producing bacteria colonies (it should be harder to NOT grow these than it would be to grow a plant!), THAT's what I'm talking about!
 
Wouldn't it be more feasible to insert the morphine making genes into the plasmids of prokaryotes?

Yes, I just figured the average joe would have an easier time maintaining yeast than keeping a bacterial culture clean. Much as they love to add antibiotic resistance to plasmids as a selection tool, it's asking a bit much if you expect to rely on it as a tool to keep culture vats pure. High alcohol tolerant yeast cultures are self-sterilizing to some extent, and would also be resistant to antibiotics. Plants would be easier yet to handle, but by diverting from sugar to light as your energy source you'd be running into the same electrical supply challenges as pot farmers.

Eh, I guess it wouldn't be that hard to teach the average tweaker-monkey how to re-establish pure bacterial cultures....plate streak and drug-test the colonies! :-)

I can't help but wonder what would happen if you stuck a glucose IV in a pot plant. I have to believe you could boost growth rates by supplementing with a sort of artificial phloem.
 
I simply find this idea way too far fetched. I think the best chance of doing is like what has been done in cannabis plants. To get it to overproduce for morphine or thebaine or codeine. The crudest ways of doing this are artificial selection and mutagenesis. However amplifying a particular gene in an opium plant in a targeted way would be the most tangible way of getting dumper truck yields of product. I dont like the idea that this can be done in yeast cells. It is just too hypothetical to be worthwhile.
 
I simply find this idea way too far fetched.

But biotechnology becomes cheaper every month, much like computer technology. Build a small artificial chromosome, inject it into a cell. Difficult and expensive? Today, perhaps. But the beast is quickly evolving. Twenty years ago, how many people thought we would soon have inexpensive 10 gigaflop PCs?

Of course, the real glory of biotech is that you'd only have to invent the wheel once. Build one cell and you can populate the world.

I think the best chance of doing is like what has been done in cannabis plants. To get it to overproduce for morphine or thebaine or codeine.

Fine and dandy, but that doesn't get past the little problem of having thousands of acres of distinctive-looking plants growing out in the open air. Drug production by an organism that can be easily and inconspicuously raised in substantial quantities in a small space is the nuclear option; higher per-acre productivity of conventional plants is just a nicety. Mutagenesis has its uses, but it could take a long time to develop the promoters you wanted without accumulating lethal levels of other mutations. Mutate, select, cross out with parental types when the strain grew weak, isolate the desired 'genes' (promoters, really), mutate some more.) No doubt you could come up with something impressive in time, but the price of using that technology would be years of labor.


"Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people."

--George Bernard Shaw
 
You can graft hops plants onto marijuana stalks, and the hops buds will have THC in them (from what I've read). But the levels of THC are reduced. Unless you were trying to disguise the plant, I don't think the idea would be worth persuing.


ACTUALLY, ne5er mind- JUst found proof that this is a myth
http://dutch-ganja.com/grafting.html
 
It would be pretty difficult, I imagine, to genetically modify bacteria or yeast into morphine-generators. Remember that Morphine is not created in a single step from raw materials in the soil (at least, as far as I know). Many molecules will need to be synthesized and metabolized through several pathways before they become Morphine - it is not a straightforward thing. Do we even know the metabolic pathways that poppies use to produce morphine? I think this would be a good first step ;).

You will need to modify the organism's DNA in such a way that it will produce all the protiens needed for all the steps in the right order necessary to biosynthesize morphine from raw nutrients.
 
Even though the metabolic pathway has been elucidated on a chemical level through radioisotopic labelling experiments. The leap from this on to a genetic level a worlds apart.
 
You will need to modify the organism's DNA in such a way that it will produce all the protiens needed for all the steps in the right order necessary to biosynthesize morphine from raw nutrients.
Not really. So long as all of the enzymes are expressed, you should get SOME of the end chemicals. And likely the enzymes have the highest affinity for the products they are supposed to hit up.. if you know what im sayin
 
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